


Betty and the Witch at the End of the World

by purplebard



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Animal Death, Domestic Violence, Estrangement, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-04-06
Packaged: 2020-01-05 11:49:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 23
Words: 72,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18365408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purplebard/pseuds/purplebard
Summary: It’s the way she looks at you, like you’re a fraction of a fraction of nothing at all, like you’re a grub in the dirt, like she wants nothing more than to clap you between her hands and make all your juices pop out of you. A splatter on the marble counter. The scariest part is not knowing how hot and how bright her frothing hate burns. It’s knowing that it’s barely being held back at all.Your name is Jade English, and you are being raised by a monster.





	1. 1913-1916

**Author's Note:**

> i started working on this fic after the skaianet systems debacle because i was frustrated with how it handled jade english, though ive been meaning to write her story for a few years now. im glad to finally get it out there, and i hope the jade-likers out there will enjoy it, too.
> 
> there is a pretty stark divide between "things that likely occurred in canon" and "stuff i made up to fill the gaps of her life story." so if reading speculative stuff isnt something you care about, you should be able to easily skip ahead to her last years from the point where she runs away from home.

     Your name is Jade Crocker. You have a very big house with a very big yard. A very long set of train tracks runs past your house and into the woods. You have a stepmother who is very tall and a father who is very dead. You can count to ten; your long-term goal is fifteen. Your favorite color is green – not green like a leaf, or like a tree in summer, but green like the center of a marble, or the sun coming through a wine bottle on the windowsill. It’s important to you that people know the difference, though most of your clothes and your things and your bedroom are white and red anyhow. Your best friend in the whole wide world is a puppy named Halley, who has the softest white fur, softer than a bunny, and when you are especially specially well-behaved and don’t even cry, your stepmother allows him to sleep at the foot of your bed.

     Your house has men in it – men who open doors for you, men who draw the curtains and clean the windows, men who wash the linens and men who till the gardens, and when your stepmother has no need of them they disappear and the house is very lonely. They are also your teachers. They teach you to count, the names of colors and shapes, how to write your own name. On Fridays, if you are especially specially well-behaved and don’t even cry, they allow you to draw. You have a teacher who locks away your pictures in a dresser drawer because the last time you tried to show them to your stepmother, she threw them away.

     You will be three years old when you start to realize that something is not quite right.

     The room next to your bedroom was a study, full of dusty books. Men will come in and out throughout the day, stripping wallpaper, taking out boxes of books, hauling out desks and globes and yellowed maps. You will linger in the doorway and watch the men paint the room an eggshell blue, assemble a white wooden cradle, lay out woven rugs and hang up soft, silky curtains.

     “Why is there a baby’s room in the li-berry?” you ask your stepmother as she stands in the kitchen. The marble island in its center is her war room. Self-penned cookbooks and flour-smudged mixing bowls are spread around her. Her battle plans, her little soldiers.  
     “Library, Jade. If you’re going to speak, speak properly.”  
     She will pause as she’s spooning dough into a muffin tray. These treats are not typically meant for you, or for her, or for anybody. You have seen her pull cakes from the oven, ice them until they were perfect, and toss them promptly into the waste bin.  
     You don't really care for the smell of sugar and frosting.  
     An approaching train wails in the distance. Your stepmother will sigh in an exasperated way.  
     “There is a baby’s room in the library because there is a baby on its way. It will need somewhere to sleep,” she continues.  
     Well, this will be news to you. “You mean I’ll have a baby sister? Or a baby brother?”  
     The idea of this will boggle you with possibilities. You wonder if you have the panache to be what stories have made you believe an older sister must be.  
     Your stepmother will snap upright. She whirls and look at you with cold eyes, her red lips puckered into a fishy frown.  
     “It will certainly not be your sister, nor your brother,” she will bark. You flinch, your little black Mary Janes pigeon-toeing nervously. “It will live here, it will eat our food, it will sit at our table just as you do. That is all.”  
     This will horribly confuse you. Two children who live together with one mother must be siblings – could all your teachers have been wrong? And how does a mother get her own baby if she doesn’t have a husband? This, too, you thought was common knowledge. You are only three years old, but you will begin to suspect that your stepmother is trying to trick you.

 

     You will be four years old when you become the elder of two young Crockers.

     It will be a April day, the sky a light gray and the rain pattering down, when you press yourself to the window and watch your stepmother step into her long black carriage. Her two freckled horses shake their heads and stamp their hooves, then trot away down the long, long driveway. You do not know what the world looks like beyond this driveway, and so it makes you happy to watch her disappear into the trees. The men are a little nicer to you then, and the air feels a little lighter. So even though it is sprinkling outside, one of your stepmother’s men will take you and Halley outside and let you walk about the garden. He will labor to keep up with your fast four-year-old legs so that he may shield you with an umbrella.

     You will be in the middle of drawing a face in the gravel walkway when the sky cracks in half. A fabulous, bright light will pierce the clouds, a sound like two cosmic hands clapping together. A fiery thing with a long, flaming tail streaks down to earth. You will stare at it in wonder, your mouth hanging open. Halley yelps wildly and flees into the underbrush.

     “What is that?” you ask the sky.  
     “It’s what’s called a meteor. A rock that falls from the sky,” the man will say. He peers at his watch. “Let us return to the house.”  
     “But we just got out here!” you will squawk, stamping your little black Mary Janes.  
     “We mustn’t be a nuisance to the Baroness when she returns,” the man will explain as he pushes you lightly in the direction of the house. “She has much work to do.”  
     “What about Halley?”  
     “The dog knows where his door is.”

     The sky goes dark, then a blinding white.

 

     You will not feel as though your life has truly begun until you first meet John Crocker.

     He sort of looks like you, you think, and sort of like your stepmother if you squint. He has fine wisps of black hair that look like fluff. In the morning when the sky is still dark blue, you will creep out of bed and to the next room, taking care to open the door very very very slowly so it does not creak. Then you will sit next to his cradle and rock it side to side, just looking in at his baby face. How any one person could ever be so small is beyond you. Were you ever this tiny, this fragile?

     Then he will begin to cry and to beat his baby fists, and the noise is still so startling and you will have to scamper out of the room and throw yourself into bed before one of the drones comes to feed or to change him or to comfort him from the sound of a passenger train racing past the estate.

     Your stepmother will not care for him with her own hands. She says it is dirty and loathsome.

     You will still be too small to carry him. Your stepmother will tell you that you shall drop him right on his head or let him tumble down the stairs, and then where will you be? You begin to think that if you touch him, he will break. So as he learns to crawl and to babble and to scoot along the smooth hardwood floors, you will hover close behind but never move to hold him or to hug him or to lead him in the right direction. You will only watch, because watching is protection enough. If you keep watching, nothing will happen to him.


	2. 1916-1918

     You will be six years old when you start to take an interest in the drones.

 

     The men who help your stepmother with the house live upstairs, in the hot attic where sometimes you can hear pipes running with water and pattering footsteps overhead. The drones, though, live in the basement. Down the long stone staircase there are dark corridors that twist and turn, dank dungeons with chains that clank, and this is where she houses them. They lumber like giants, shining and bright red with long beetle horns and bristling armor. You have never quite taken an interest in them because they never ever speak, but now their silence is a burning question mark.

     One day when John is in your old playroom putting colored blocks together, you follow a trundling drone down the marble front entryway because you think it’s funny that it doesn’t even notice you. You trail along as closely as you can, your little Mary Janes almost kicking the back of its metal feet. You will latch onto the spines down its back and use them to lift yourself off the ground, kicking your feet and squealing with glee. You will be lumbering past the kitchen when your stepmother cranes her neck to watch what you’re doing. Then you will hear the brisk _tap-tap-tapping_ of her high heels against the linoleum, then the marble, then the rug, and then she will spin you around with her hand on your shoulder. Before you even have time to react, she will strike you across the face.

     Now, by this time you will not be a baby anymore, so you will not burst into tears as you might have in the past. Instead you will suck in your breath and look away, your hand clasped to your burning cheek. Everything is fuzzy; she’s knocked your glasses to the floor.

     “You are not to bother the drones, do you understand?” your stepmother hisses. “They are not playthings. They are not here for your amusement. They are here to serve me. Do not interfere with their duties.”

     You will whimper a response, and when you do not meet her eye she will grab you by the wrist. Her hand is very clammy. “Tell me that you understand.”

     “I understand,” you murmur.

     She loathes it when you don’t look at her. She thinks it’s disobedient. Your stepmother will unleash your wrist and instead pinch your chin in her hand. Her painted nails and her golden, gem-encrusted rings are very sharp. You feel as though they will pierce the skin. When she forces you to meet her eye, she will stare into them very carefully. Like she’s picking apart your brain.

     Then she lets go of you and points up the stairs.

     “Go.”

     You will pick up your glasses and run.

  


     Up in your bedroom you will sniffle and cry and kick your Mary Janes off. It makes you very angry to cry because crying has never gotten you anything at all but sent away from the dinner table. And being angry makes you want to cry _more_ . It isn’t fair. Nothing is fair! Anger boils your blood, and your body will be quivering with the need to push something over, to snap something in your hands, to do something so outrageous and loud and inconvenient that your stepmother will have no other choice but to acknowledge how angry you are, how angry _she_ has made you. Anger will feel like a stomachache, a constant sting that pricks and burns.

      You are about to toss a porcelain mermaid from your bookshelf to the floor when you hear tapping on the other side of the wall.

 

     “Jade?” will come his mousy voice.

     You will sniff hard and drop to your knees against the wall, pressing your hands to the textured wallpaper. You can see the glare of his glasses past the hole you’ve chipped through the plaster. You did this when he was too tiny to talk, when you wanted to peer into the room and hear his baby-not-brother sounds without being caught in the middle of the hallway. You will try not to look like you’ve been weeping.

     “Hullo John,” you murmur. “Are you done playing?”

     “Yeah.” There’s the sound of him huffing and puffing, adjusting his position on the cold floor. Your stepmother dresses him in long socks and sweater vests and collars that itch him. You know he is tugging at his sleeves because he is so uncomfortable. “You’re being loud.”

     He has such a babyish voice. He can’t enunciate anything, and he is so matter-of-fact that it even makes your stepmother’s men laugh.

     “Sorry.” You wipe your eyes. “John, I don’t think I’ll be allowed to dinner.”

     Shuffling and thoughtful silence from the other side of the wall. Your not attending dinner is not terribly uncommon, and so John does not throw a fit. For a baby, he is very accommodating. “Okay.”

     “Be nice to Mother,” you whisper. “Do what she says.”

     “Okay,” he will respond. Of course he will. He knows no other way. He isn’t grown up, like you.

     “I’m tired,” you will tell the wall. “I’m taking a nap. Keep playing with your toys.”

 

     You will lie in bed with your day dress still on, crumpled and tear-stained. You will listen to John mash his colored squares and circles and triangles into a wooden board because he is just a baby, after all, and he likes babyish things. You are six years old now, though, and so you have left those things behind. John is just a baby. And though your stepmother tells you it isn’t true, that you mustn’t think it’s true, that she will strike you if you say so, he feels so dear to you that he must be something akin to a little brother, and for that reason you have no choice but to protect him. You will shed all the tears and bear all the pain, because you are grown up and you can take it.

     When the sky turns purple that night and the dinnertime sounds of silverware and servants cease to float up through the vents, you hear a tiny knock on your door. Before you can get out of bed to answer it – your stomach will cramp so terribly that it makes your head fuzzy –  John’s little brown hand will pop into the doorway and set a dinner roll down on the floor. Then you hear him scramble down the hallway to be washed for bed.

     You will pick the roll up and it will be quite damp from being squeezed in his hand, or shoved in his pocket, or wherever he kept it. But you’ll eat it anyway. Brothers and sisters look out for one another –  this much you understand.

  
  
  


     You will be eight years old when you stop smiling.

 

     Well, perhaps this is melodrama. Sometimes you will smile – at Halley when he digs in the dirt and chases squirrels, behind your stepmother’s back when you’ve hidden something that she can’t seem to uncover, but mostly at your baby brother. John is so funny and so sweet and at four years old you love to watch him discover the world around him. It’s a small world, dreadfully boring and very sad, but he doesn’t see it that way.

     You will have learned by now what a secret is and how to keep it. Servants have patched the hole you punched in the plaster that you used to speak to John during the night. So you have decided that you will learn Morse code, and that John shall pick it up as well. He is a very fast learner. He can already count to twenty. The worst thing your stepmother could do is move John’s room to the other wing of the house. Which, when reflected upon, sounds quite terrible.

 

     Thinking about these possibilities will be why you don’t smile anymore.

 

     You will already be dressed for bed when you pull your desk chair up to the wall, right underneath a watercolor painting of a sailboat that has been hanging there since you were too young to know what it was. You lift your knuckle to the wallpaper and begin rapping against it.

_Tap. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap._ “John?” you spell out. It was the first thing you taught yourself to code. Halley lifts his head from his spot on the rug and watches you lazily.

     There is a pause and a shuffling from the other room. You hear John jump down from his bed, where he has learned to read himself storybooks until he falls asleep with them slumping on his chest.

_Tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap. Tap-t-tap-tap._ “Hello Jade.”

     “Good job,” you spell out against the wall. “It’s almost time for bed,” you chide.

_Tap tap-t-tap. “_ Five more minutes.”

_T-t-tap. T-tap-tap. “_ O.K.”

_T-t-tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap._ “Goodnight.” Then you will hear him push himself off the rug and throw himself back into bed.

 

     You will smile to yourself, just a small one, because it makes you so happy to have a little brother who is so smart. It makes you proud.

      It makes you want to teach him everything.


	3. 1921

     You will be eleven when you start to take apart telephones.

     It starts when you tread down the hallway to reach the wall phone by the grand staircase. You will pick up the receiver and start to type in the extension for the outside phone – perhaps one of the men trimming the trees has seen Halley running about – but when you press the ‘3’ button it seems loose, like it will pop off at any moment. The dial tone buzzes in your ear, the incomplete number flashing red numbers on the screen. You will decide to hang up and fix it yourself.

     There are many books in your family’s library about mechanics, about ships and planes and how to disassemble them and put them back better than before. This problem seems simple enough to fix, even if you have never handled a screwdriver before. So you scamper down the stairs and past the kitchen where Stepmother is whipping eggs on the stove (she doesn’t turn to look at you), then into the pantry where the men keep their sandpaper and their tools and their mason jars of bolts and screws and nails. You lift up the front of your skirt and use it to hold two screwdrivers (in case one is too big), some needle-nose pliers, and an assortment of things you’ve seen in books but aren’t sure you’ll need.

     Your stepmother turns and stares at you as you tramp through the kitchen rattling with metal.

     “What are you doing with all of that?” she’ll ask. She smells sugarsweet, like frosting and fondant. It’s an awful smell that burns in your nostrils.  
     You’ll freeze, look at her briefly and stare down at your feet. “Fixing the phone,” you say.  
     She waves you away. “Just don’t screw it up worse than the help can fix.”

     And that will be the beginning of a great fascination.

     You will take apart phones that are perfectly functional, remove and scatter all the keys and chips and wires and spread them across the library desk, putting them together piece by tiny piece. John will sit himself in a barstool at the kitchen island, flipping idly through your stepmother’s self-penned cookbooks while you sit on the counter and take apart the microwave, gutting it of its magnetron tube and all the other bits before your stepmother will even know you’ve touched it. Later, when she uses it to heat up a stick of butter, she’ll make a small noise of consideration when it begins to melt in half the time.

     At dinner, with the lights dimmed low and the sounds of silverware and clinking porcelain replacing any conversation, your stepmother will clear her throat and look at you through her bright pink reading glasses. You will stare at her steadily. It makes you afraid to look into her eyes, so you stare at the tip of her nose.

     Your stepmother’s hands are always poised like claws; as she hovers her fork and knife above the plate, it’s like she’s wondering how hard she needs to throw them at you. Because you do not like to look at her directly, you take in the image of her in slices. Puzzle pieces that skitter-scatter into one frightful whole. The chandelier glares off of the golden rings on her fingers, off of her pearl bracelets and the necklaces draped ‘round her neck. Her shining black hair is short and sharp, curling into spirals around her ears and forehead. Her hanging earrings sway a bit as she cocks her head at you.

     “You’re becoming quite a little handyman, aren’t you Jade?” she will ask sweetly. Her red lips part in a smile that you recognize now as a trick. She wants to fool you into being comfortable.  
     You push a piece of beef around on the plate. “I like to know how things work.”  
     Your stepmother will consider this as she swirls her glass of red wine. “Knowing how things work can sometimes lead you into trouble.”  
     In the hallway, where dim light casts shadows across a porcelain urn, you hear the hollow thudding of heavy footsteps. The light darkens for a moment as a bright red drone lowers itself to lumber down the hall, then disappears. You do not speak until you know it is gone.  
     “I don’t understand.”  
     Her face falls to the expression you’re most familiar with, her tired mouth and her furrowed eyebrows.  
     “No. I suppose you wouldn’t.”  
     John looks between the two of you, uncomfortable. You can hear his foot tapping anxiously below the table. He puts his fork down and fiddles with his bowtie.  
     “I think it’s nice to have a hobby,” he’ll pipe up.  
     Your stepmother will look at him blankly for a moment, then break into condescending laughter.  
     “That it is. It’s good to have the things which distract us.”

     She reaches across the table and pinches his cheek. You will scowl and continue playing with your dinner.


	4. 1922

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the only illustrated chapter, which i actually drew before i even began writing this fic. dont get used to em

     You will be twelve years old when you see the worst thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

 

     It will be eleven at night, later than you ever stay up, because your head hurts and your few bouts of sleep have jolted you awake in fear. You’ll be sitting at your desk by the window, staring at your reflection in the window. You rub your eyes in exhaustion.

     Somewhere from the far end of the house, Halley will begin to bark. It’s a panicked sound, closer to a yip despite his size. You hear John groan on the other side of the wall. He barks again. It will raise the hair on your neck.

     Your stepmother hates it when Halley barks. You know she is not above striking him, either. The dog has to be quieted down. You will push in your desk chair, creep to the door, and begin to tread quietly down the dark corridor.

     The house is larger than life once the sun goes down. Mounted animal heads cast shadows along the paneling. Wind clatters against the rows of windows, and in the long and lonesome distance you can hear the whining of a train approaching the house. When it finally chugs by, the foundation of the house will tremble with its passing.

     “ _Halley_?” you’ll whisper into the dark. Outside you can hear the yipping of a coyote, but no Halley.

     In your stocking feet, you creep around the corner into the next wing of the house. Another bark will sound, closer this time. You clench your teeth and think of all the very bad curse words you know; this is your stepmother’s wing, and if she finds the dog yelping and you intruding –  with bare feet no less – you will both be punished. You will scamper as silently as you can down the long, dark red rug that runs through the center of the hall.

     The train trails past the house and the halls are silent again. You will slow down so as to not creak the loose floorboards, peering around the corner to where you know your stepmother keeps her studies and her personal libraries and the rooms where she makes important calls. And there’s her voice, coming from the end of the hall.

     You press yourself flush to the wall so she won’t see your shadow in the light spilling out of the open door. Halley will bark once more, much closer this time, but she keeps talking. You will trace yourself along the paneling, your palms whisking the carved filigree patterns in the wood. As you approach you can hear her muffled voice:

 _“... could you accuse of deceiving you? What good would it do me to lie? You’ve_ doomed _me here, you–”_

     Then your stepmother will gasp –  when have you ever heard her gasp? –  and an explosion of neon flashing light will pour from the open doorway. Bright yellow and green and red and purple bounces off of the marble busts along the corridor, a sour, blinding, throbbing-headache  menagerie.

 **IF YOU THINK YOU ARE DOOMED. YOU ARE ONLY DOOMED. BECAUSE YOU BROUGHT IT ON YOURSELF.** will come a terrible, deep and resonating voice from the inside of the study. It bounces around inside your skull and makes you feel nauseous with its bass-deep volume. There’s a growl to it, a texture on your ears like gravel. You will clench your jaw and press your hands to your ears. **YOU WANTED YOUR POWER. I GAVE IT TO YOU. DID YOU EXPECT IT TO BE FREE?**

     Your stepmother will shout, “Of course it hasn’t been _free_! I lost my empire to you! I sawed my _horns_ for you!”

**PISSING AND PETULANCE. IS ALL YOU HAVE TO OFFER?**

     With your heart slamming in your ribs, you press your hand to the door frame and peer at only the tiniest sliver of the room you can see from your angle. All you will be able to glimpse is the whipping of a coattail, a series of colored stripes that flash in neon rows.

     Your stepmother’s voice will go stony. You will be able to imagine her straightening up as she does when she’s considering whether to knock your glasses across the room.

     “It’s been nearly twenty sweeps,” she snaps, “and all you give me is piddly wiggler’s games. When can I release the drones? When will you give me back my _ship_ ? I can _do_ whatever it is you want from me, I just need my _life_ back!”

 **HA, HA, HA. THE TROLL QUEEN MISSES HER TOYS.** The demon will laugh with a sound like static. **THE TOYS CAN COME OUT. WHEN THE GAME IS PLAYED. THE GAME IS PLAYED. WHEN THE METEORS LAND. YOU KEEP YOURSELF IN CHECK. IN THE MEANTIME.**

     You will take a brief break from terror in order to be confused.  


     “Wait, wait!” she shouts in a panic. “You told me you’d send another platoon of Dersites to the lake to feed her!”

     Plantation Lake is a two mile walk down the rural backroads, edged with weeping willows. A quarter mile before it there is a rusted gate with a “PRIVATE PROPERTY –  NO TRESPASSING” sign before it. You have never tried to take Halley beyond it on your summer afternoon walks, though the glinting of its water in the distance looked as inviting as it possibly could to a girl whose stepmother did not teach her how to swim.

**A GIRL SHOULD TAKE RESPONSIBILITY. OF HER OWN PETS.**

     “She isn’t a _pet_ , and her whispers are growing fierce,” she will hiss. “Without my ship, I can’t take care of her properly.”

**A PLATOON WILL COME. IF YOU WILL WAIT. THE HORRORTERROR HAS EONS AHEAD OF HER. A DELAY WILL NOT KILL HER.**

     “I did my waitin’ during the _last_ timeline, English!” she will shout. “And you yanked me out and made me do it all over again, with _worse_ children! You’re the Lord of Time, can’t we skip past this torture?”

**YOU MIGHT HAVE CONSIDERED THIS. BEFORE YOU KILLED MY HANDMAID. THE GIRL UNDERSTOOD TIME. AND PATIENCE. YOU WILL LEARN THE HARD WAY.**

     Your stepmother has _killed_ someone? It will not necessarily astound you, but to hear it put so bluntly will chill you to the bone. Quietly and very very slowly, you poke your face just past the doorway. Your stepmother will be only a dark silhouette, blurred by the manic flashing of the lights before her. You squeeze your eyes shut, then blink them open and force yourself to look at the creature in the room with her.

     It will be a sight you never forget.

     The demon in your stepmother’s study has a skull for a face, with flashing neon eyes and teeth like a wildcat. Its hands are larger than life, enough to crush your stepmother under their palms. The trim of its overcoat is a series of color-changing panels that blink so quickly that you have to shut your eyes again. When you think its skull turns to look at you in the doorway, you will throw yourself to the other side of the wall and press your hands to your mouth. It will be all you can do to stop from screaming.

 

 

**YOU WANT A LIFE. NEVERENDING. YOU RECEIVED IT. NOW YOU WILL PAY. YOUR DEBT TO ME.**

     A pitiful howl will sound across the hall. Your eyes fall on the closed door closest to you. And there’s Halley’s shadow, moving back and forth on the other side. Lowering yourself to your knees, you will scramble to the door and do your best to turn the crystal knob without a creak. Halley’s snout will poke out just as you crack it open. With your arm firmly around his fluffy white neck, you yank him out of the room and allow him to lick your face.

     Before you close the door, you take a glimpse inside. All of your stepmother’s great big computer screens have lost reception. They’ve gone to colorful static.

     “When will you be back?” you will hear your stepmother ask as you’re dragging Halley down the corridor. Her voice will sound resigned, a certain exhaustion to it you will have heard only rarely in your life.

 **TWO SWEEPS. PERHAPS MORE. BY THAT TIME. TRY TO IMPRESS ME.**  


     It will be three in the morning when you see your stepmother again.

     You will have tried earnestly to sleep, but it will not come to you. All you see behind your eyelids are throbbing pulses of colors. Your head feels like it’s splitting in half. In your robe and nightgown, you will toe yourself into your red slippers and go to the third floor balcony.

 

     The cold night air will feel good on your face. The railing is already slick with dew, and the stars are so bright and so scattered across the sky. You will wish you could fling yourself to a distant star system, settle a new planet and live there all alone. You squeeze your slippers between the railing and lean over the edge, making yourself taller.

     Footsteps from the hallway inside. Your stepmother will push open the glass door and lean on the railing beside you. You will allow yourself a quick glance at her face. Her forehead looks sweaty.

     “You’re up late,” she will say matter-of-factly.

     It doesn’t sound like a scolding, which will surprise you. You’re not sure what to say in response. It’s very easy to say the wrong thing around her – and you never know what the wrong thing will be.

     “Couldn’t sleep,” is all you will manage to say.  
      Your stepmother considers this. You watch her pinch the bridge of her nose out of the corner of your eye. “Thinkin’ of jumping?” she’ll ask.  
     You can’t tell whether or not she’s joking. Perhaps she hears how fast your heart is beating, because she will start to chuckle to herself. A low and frightening sounds.  
     “It’s very easy, you know. You just have to know how far to climb before the fall will kill you.”

     She will fish something out of her pocket and play with it. It’s a clay flower pot you sculpted for John when he was still a baby. Lumpy and uneven, you painted it with green and blue children’s paints and placed it on his dresser full of tiny socks and baby clothes. For years it’s sat in the same place. Your stepmother must have been in John’s room. Doing what, you don’t know. Perhaps just standing in the doorway, or sitting in his desk chair, with her face resting on her fist as she stared at him sleeping. Your arms prickle with goosebumps.

     Your stepmother thumbs the grooves in the clay. “Do you know how it feels, Jade, when you’ve poured so much time into building something, just to have it taken away?”

     Yes, you do. There is a reason you stopped showing her the things you drew or painted. You don’t say this out loud, though.

     Your stepmother sighs. “Of course you wouldn’t. You haven’t lived at all.”

     She holds out her hand past the railing and lets the flower pot fall. All you can do is part your lips in shock as it tumbles down and cracks into pieces in the grass.

  
  


     The next evening, your stepmother will request to have dinner with you alone.

     The dinner table is very lonesome with three people around it, much less two. Your stepmother will sit at the very end, so far that with your nearsightedness it’s hard to see the changing expressions of her face. You are perched on the other end, and all that separates you is a crisp, white tablecloth and a long trail of candelabras flickering with flame.

     So you will do what you often do when you find yourself alone with her, and keep your eyes down. You have found that looking either busy or on your way to someplace very important often saves you from speaking to her. Thus, you make quite a grand show of cutting your meatloaf into identical little cubes, partitioning them off from the mounds of mashed potatoes and green beans you’ve pushed to opposite sides of your plate.

     “You look sullen,” your stepmother remarks.  
     You will glimpse up at her and she will be resting her elbow on the table, her chin propped on the top of her hand. She twiddles one of her rings back and forth with her thumb.  
     “This is just my face,” is your murmured reply.  
     “Hm. Well.” Your stepmother pops a bite of meat in her mouth. “You always did have a sourpuss look about you, even when you were a baby.”

     It’s hard to conceptualize yourself as that small. You wonder if the only touch you ever felt was from the servants feeding and changing and burping you. It will be impossible to imagine your stepmother holding you in her arms, how she might have bounced you on her knee or cooed to you as you babbled.

     Your eyes will float to the dark portrait above the mantle, the one of the Colonel. Your stepmother tells you that Sassacre was your father. He has wild hair and a bushy moustache, with a mirthful squint in his old eyes. This man is just a picture, though. John reads his texts –  devours them – but you have never felt much for the memory of him. He’s a decoration, as much so as the porcelain figurines that sit underneath his likeness. The candles on the mantle dance and flicker, making it look like he’s wagging his wiry white eyebrows. It is still much better than the real him. You do not like to go into the parlor because you hate the look of his silhouette against the fireplace.

     Just a picture. If he hadn’t gone and died, he might’ve protected you.

     She will follow your glance to the mantle, and in your self-consciousness you will begin chopping away at your meat with renewed fervor.

     “You certainly read quite a bit, don’t you Jade?” she asks. She has a terrible way of posing questions that seem innocent. “Reading can relieve whatever stress you’re under. When _I_ read it just…” she waves her fork in a twirling way, “...takes me away.”  
     “I like to read about science,” you will shrug. “I’m reading about the moon.”  
     “That piddly thing? Most planets can manage more than just one satellite.” Your stepmother snorts and sips her flute of champagne. “You should fill your mind with more cultured things. Men don’t like little girls who make them feel dumb.”  
     “If I make a man feel dumb, then perhaps he isn’t worth my time.”

     To your great shock, your stepmother will burst into a cackling, nasally laughter. It lacks any depth to it, like it’s coming from underwater.

     “Well, that’s something you’ll learn in time. Men seldom are.” She finishes her flute.  
     “Is that why all of our servants are men?”  
     “Oh for God’s sake, Jade, how many times do I have to explain it to you before it gets through your skull? They aren’t men, they’re robots.”

     Your stepmother will clap her hands together twice, and a hidden panel in the wall will swivel to unveil a servant in a tuxedo, a crisp white length of linen folded over his arm. She holds out her glass without looking at him, and he refills it nearly to the brim with a spout that comes out of his wrist. It will not be until years later that you learn this stuff is illegal everywhere else –  just another way your stepmother is above the law. The servant’s red eyes shine bright in the dim dining room.

     You aren’t stupid; you know they aren’t human. It makes you feel better to pretend they are, though. There might be humans out there with bolts in their joints –  who are you to judge?

     “Anywho… what was I saying?”  
     “‘Cultured things.’”  
     “Oh, yes. Culture. The world or… whatever,” she says with a disdainful scowl as she swirls her champagne.  
     “You’re really selling it,” you will reply, stone-faced.  
     “You would be surprised what you could learn by reading up on other ways of life.” She sets the flute down and takes a large bite of meatloaf. Her fork glitters.      “There are societies in which women are in command. Ones where men snivel at home, at the beck and call of their wives.”  
     You don’t say anything.  
     “Ones where women make the laws, where they are the judges and the juries. Ones where women are warriors. And they would fight one another for control.”  
     “That must be a frightening world to live in, if it’s true,” is all you give her.  
     “How lucky you are, then, to give in a country where your mother dotes on you rather than forcing you to fight her. I haven’t even taught you how to defend yourself. No one has. What chance would you have?”  
     “Fighting for control?” you ask. You pile a large spoonful of potatoes in your mouth because you know what it coming.  
     “For anything at all,” she drawls, gazing at you in a way that reminds you of Halley waiting in the yard for a groundhog to pop its head out of the dirt.  
     “Then other girls are very lucky indeed to have their doting mothers. And I have my stepmother, who is kind enough to let me live.”

     Your stepmother’s face goes cold, the corner of her red lips twitching. She straightens up and snaps her fingers, and at once a servant emerges from the wall behind you. You shovel as much meatloaf into your face as you can before he whisks your plate away.  
  
  


_Tap tap. Tap-t-tap._ “Are you awake?”  
     It takes John a moment to respond this time. _T-t-t-tap tap tap tap._ “How was dinner?”  
     “Miserable,” you knock against the wallpaper.  
     His silence is heavy on the other side. “You didn’t finish, did you?”  
     “How did you guess?”  
 _Tap tap. T-t-tap._ “Not funny.”  
You close your eyes and rest your forehead against the cold wall. “I have something to tell you.”  
     “What is it?” he asks. His voice is a muffle through the thin plaster.  
     “I don’t know if I can say it, even through the wall,” you rap out in Morse code.  
     You will hear the slightest sigh from the other side.  
     “Try to get some rest,” he says. Then he taps with his knuckle, “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”  
 _T-t-tap. T-tap-tap. “_ O.K.”

     The colors still haven’t left the inside of your eyes. When you get under the quilt and turn off the light, you will suddenly start to cry.  
  


     You will be awoken the next morning before the sun has risen. A servant will be standing over the bed, a dirty apron and a basket of tools in his arms.

     “The Baroness has requested your presence in the garden,” he says in an automaton voice.

     You will rub your bleary eyes. No use in arguing. You put on your work clothes and tie the apron behind your back, struggling a bit in your exhaustion to tie your shoes.

     When you step out into the hallway, you’ll find John in a similar getup. He yawns and sniffles.

     “G’morning,” he mumbles.  
     You take his tools away from him and put them all in your basket. “Not for long.”

     Out in the garden, your stepmother will be lounging across a bench in her red sundress, bobbing her high-heeled foot and sipping a tall glass of pink lemonade. She waves at the two of you and jerks her thumb to the bed of weeds that’s been growing along the iron fence.

     “Good morning, boys and girls,” she twitters. “Have you seen the forecast for today? It’s going to be _lovely_ out; I couldn’t bear it if you cooped yourselves inside with your dusty old books.”

     “So you want us to pull weeds?” you’ll ask.

     “Don’t underestimate the importance of basic lawn care,” your stepmother will reply with a wag of her finger. “Now, I’ve had the help cultivate a nice patch for you to work with.” She takes a long sip of her lemonade. “It’s close to the tracks, you’ll notice. The vibrations can mess with their circuitry. So if you start to hear it coming,” her voice drops to a condescending whisper, “ _step away from the fence.”_  
     John looks into his basket and rummages around. “Um… there aren’t any gloves in here.”  
     “There aren’t supposed to be,” she’ll say. “If all you do is read and draw and play cards, you’ll never build any callouses.”

He looks up at you with panic in his big blue eyes. Some angry, impulsive quip will lodge itself in your throat with its sour bile before you manage to swallow it. If you argue now, the punishment will be worse. And nothing can be _too_ awful about pulling buckhorn and dandelions.

     You’ll give him a placating look and a tight-lipped smile that says _It’ll be fine._

     “You can get to work now,” your stepmother says with a dismissive wave of her hand.

  


     It won’t be dandelions and buckhorn along the fence. It’s just a tangled wall of bull thistle, purple buds sprouting everywhere, all covered with thorns.

     For a moment you will stare at the mess of it with your fists clenching your dirt-smudged apron. You try attacking it one way, then the other, and hiss each time with a thistle pokes your skin.

     “Ouch!” John will yelp. He shakes his hand, pouting.

     You take his hand in yours. He’s already got a thistle stuck in his finger. As gingerly as you can, you use your stubby nails to pluck it out and toss it into the grass.

     “Just pretend to cut,” you say softly. “I’ll get them all.”

     “But that isn’t fair!”

     He takes his shears again and cautiously pokes his hand into the thicket, wincing as the bulb of a thistle brushes the bottom of his hand. Your heart will begin to race with anger. John is just eight years old –  these things will tear him apart. You turn around and glare at the bench where your stepmother is perching, but she’s not there anymore. She’s standing behind you.

     “Having trouble getting started?” she asks. She tilts her head, her gold hoops dangling.  
     “It’s awfully thorny,” you will mutter. John will be sucking on his hand where the first thistle drew blood.  
     “Oh, it’s hard at first, isn’t it?” she coos. “Here, let me lend a hand.”

     Then she will snatch your wrist before you can drop your shears and plunge your hand into the thistles.

  
  


     Later on, when the crickets are whining and the sun is sinking and your stomach is yowling with pain, your stepmother flashes the porch light to beckon you inside. When you help John to his feet, your legs will be plastered with blades of grass and clumps of dirt. Your hands throbbed for a while, but now they just feel numb. Your ears will ring with the sound of the last train that flashed by on the other side of the fence.

     John will hold his hands out to his sides as you untie his apron for him. Your blood will boil when you see the red smears where he wiped off his cuts and scratches. You end up opening the back door with your elbow.

     The sink will be running in the kitchen. Your stepmother is baking something –  the sugary smell of icing flits in your nostrils, mingling with the awful stink of sweat and dirt that clings to your skin. She will motion for you to remove your shoes, then beckon you to the sink.

     “Your hands are filthy,” she quips. “Wash up.”

     Your stepmother will stand out of the way and allow you to pump a few handfuls of soap into your palm. It stings on your cuts, and you will squeeze your eyes tight and clench your jaw. Then you will run them under the water and yelp with pain.

     “Oops!” Your stepmother titters, her hand in front of her mouth. “Must’ve run the water too hot.”

     You will cradle your burning hands gingerly, stinging with fresh agony. But you bite your lip –  you won’t cry in front of her. You will not give her this victory.

     She pushes you away from the sink and turns the faucet off. Your brother will watch her very carefully to make sure she turns the knob for cold water, and even when his hands are full of soap he cautiously tests it with the tip of his finger.

     Your stepmother will laugh at him. “What, do you think I’m trying to hurt you?”

  
  


     That night, with your hands wrapped in bandages and stinging with aloe, you shuffle across your bedroom in your slippers and take a pencil from your desk. With your ear pressed to the wall, you tap it with your eraser.

 _T-tap. T-tap-tap._ “Awake?”  
     John’s bed springs groan from the other side. “Barely,” he says aloud.  
     “How are your hands?”  
     “Yours are worse off than mine. Thanks for trying to help.”  
     “I’m sorry,” you murmur to the wall. “Whatever today was, it was my fault. I’m sorry you got dragged into it.”

There’s a long silence from John’s bedroom, and you will be terrified that he’s angry with you. But all you hear is the tiny breath of a sigh.

     “Don’t worry about it,” he says.  
     His hands hurt too much for Morse code. It will strike you that this was probably your stepmother’s goal to begin with. A sour feeling of dread pools in your stomach.  
“What did you want to tell me?” he asks when you don’t respond.

You’ll shake your head and blink away your pinpricks of tears. “Nothing. I’ll tell you another time.”


	5. 1923

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if youve read my fics before, you might recognize that a part of this chapter was lifted from a story nanna told davesprite. can you tell which part it is?

     You will be thirteen when you learn to put together a radio.

     It will not be nearly as hard as you imagined it would be, not after all those telephones you’ve dis- and reassembled. Earlier that week your stepmother will get a new copy of _Vanity Fair_ , and an advertisement will slip out for the “Home-O-Phone Radio Telephone Receiving Set,” whose promises of high quality material and emphasis that it is “ _not a toy_ ” will greatly appeal to you. Your stepmother rebuffs you when you plead for one – “It’s a primitive technology, Jade, far beneath us” – so you will set out to craft one for yourself. All you needed to scrounge up was some wire and pliers from the utility closet, some library paste, a piece of wood from the woodshed, and the pieces of a telephone that one of the servants was going to dispose of.

     (It took some convincing, but with enough doe eyes and dimples you were able to convince one of the men to lend you some chips, a few diodes, and an old antenna. Whose spare parts they used to be, you don’t know.)

     It takes the better part of the afternoon, John trying and failing to spark conversation out of you as you monopolize a table in the library with your array of junk parts. Eventually he gives up and sits on the floor beside you, using his playing cards to build a towering house. Every time you scoot in your chair, he draws in an anxious inhale for fear that it will all come tumbling down.

     “Done!” you’ll shout when you get the first quips of a frequency.  

     John will rest his chin in his arms as you twist the antenna this way and that. Tiny blips of conversation burble through the static. Once, you get the tinny blast of a trumpet. As you listen closely for anything coherent, he scratches at the dark mole on his cheek.

     “What are you hoping to hear?” he asks with a tone of disinterest.  
     “Anything, really.” You will hear the first few lyrics of a jazz number, but then it blips into gurgling static. “Oh, confound it! The reception must be bad at this end of the house.”  
     John furrows his bushy eyebrows. “What does that mean?”  
     “Fancy radio terminology for ‘I can’t hear anything over here.’ I need to move it somewhere else.” You’ll collect your delicate machine in your arms and cradle it like a fragile baby. “I’m taking this to my room.”  
     “Aw, come on!” John will complain loudly. Your stepmother doesn’t like you to be in each other’s rooms, and you feel sorry to be ditching him, but work is work.  
     “I won’t be long,” you promise. You ruffle his wispy black hair before tramping out of the library and down to your own room.

  
     It will be almost dark when you get to listen to anything _really_ interesting.

     You’ll be lying in bed with your arms folded behind your head, your ankle resting on your knee as you bob your foot to the shrill whining of a piano number with poor reception. You’ve placed your jerry-rigged radio as close to the window as it will fit, the antennae stretched to its limit. Suddenly the music will fade out, and you’ll turn to your side as a man’s nasally voice overtakes the frequency.

 

“ _... is KDK3, serving the greater Pacific, Lewis, and Wahkiakum county area, and if you find yourself lucky on a windy day, our friends and listeners down in Cowlitz. Hoping you enjoyed our broadcasting of Paul Whiteman Orch’s “What’ll I Do?,” and we’ll have more in the next hour. Now speakin’ of which, we been gettin’ plenty-a listeners of the female variety callin’ in for tunes that ain’t such a snore. To which I say – pardon me, miss, don’t you get enough-a that at the speakeasy? In all seriousness, listeners, we all seen the movie, but what coulda prepared us for flappers in the Evergreen state? And here’s a secret, my friends, just between you, me, and the tri-county area: I think my own cousin, who shall remain unnamed –  let’s call her Nan – has caught wind of the flappin’ craze. Lemme tell you the scream her mama let loose when she came home with her locks cut off! I’m tellin’ you she had hair to her feet, and now Nan’s gonna be havin’ freezin’ ears come Christmas. Now since I respect the art of broadcasting so much, I’ll leave it at that and leave her dresses to your imagination. She ain’t shy with the sequins though, I tell ya that. I say to her one day, I say, Nan, why don’t you give a man a warning before ya show your knees off to every Tom Dick and Harry I know, huh?”_

 

     You’ve never heard of flappers before. You will try to remember whether you might have glimpsed them on the covers of your stepmother’s glamorous magazines. Sparkling dresses and chin-sharp hair –  well, it certainly seems bold for you, but it’s not far off from how your stepmother already looks. Though, granted, your stepmother’s dresses don’t cut off at the knees.

     Also, you were sort of hoping for something from a more interesting locale, like New York or Chicago. But you’ll take what you can get.

     The man on the air laughs at a private joke as you sit at your vanity. “Vanity” is a generous word for it – it’s just a big mirror on the wall with a narrow white desk where you keep your brushes and combs and headbands. Loose buttons from various clothes are scattered in the drawers. You take out a brush filled with your tangled black hair and consider how it might look cut so short. With two fingers each, you part your hair into halves and bring your fingers to your jawline. It looks sort of cute, you think, and would take less time to wash and brush and braid. How many hours of your life have you lost to braiding your stupid hair?  
 

_“Now poor Nan can’t keep a guy longer than three days tops! That’s a joke, folks, seein’ as Nan can’t stand the sight of ‘em after a night or two. I tell ya, hell hath no fury like a flapper bored. My mama says to my sister, ‘Now, let me catch you comin’ home at midnight with your eyes rollin’ and your hair sheep-shorn and just see what I does to you!’ No worries, Mama, it takes a special type of bim to holler at The Heat and gamble at the speakeasies the way our Nan does. Anywho, I gots a caller here says ‘pack it up fella, save it for the reunion.’ Okay, okay, I hear ya loud and clear. Next are the swingin’ tunes of Paul Whiteman….”_

 

     It’s not just a look, then. It’s a way of life! This will be very exciting to you, the idea of tramping about wherever you wish, doing what you want and not giving a hoot what your stepmother says. What would she say if you showed up to dinner with chin-short hair? What would be the harm, really? Hair grows back. 

     You jump up and fetch your scissors from the Mason jar of utensils that sits on your desk. Your stepmother has never so much as trimmed your hair, just let it grow wild and long until it’s almost reached your bottom. It’s a grand mane she’s stuck you with, and it must be so freeing to cut it loose. You will return to the vanity with your heart fluttering with exhilaration.

     Taking one half of your hair, you demarcate the line with your fingers and open your scissors. The blades brush the first few coils of your hair, and you’re about to snip them off when your bedroom door opens.

     For a moment, you and your stepmother will simply stare at each other. Then her pencilled eyebrows will furrow, and she will stand up straight and look at your down the length of her nose. You slowly set your scissors down on the table.

     “Well, if you’re quite finished,” she breathes with quiet rage, her hands on her hips, “you’re helping with dinner.”

  


     Some time will pass between the two of you before you speak.

     You’re chopping tomatoes for what will become her marinara sauce, watching her out of the corner of your eye as she glazes unbaked bread with a brush dipped in olive oil. She clears her throat as she’s placing the loaves into the oven.

     “I wish you wouldn’t mutilate yourself, angelfish,” is all she says.  
     “It’s just hair.”  
     “On the contrary. It shows age and maturity. And it’s lovely to look at.” She takes a mixing bowl and cracks open a carton of eggs –  your stepmother likes to begin dessert early. “If I wanted you to hack away at it, I would’ve cut it myself.”  
     “Why isn’t your hair longer, then?”  
     “It used to be. I had to cut it short for work. It’s easier this way.” 

     She reaches out and tucks your hair behind your ear with her clammy fingers. Your stepmother will look at you sweetly, her black and feathery lashes batting at you, shading her dark irises. The trace of her hand, the brushing of her pearl bracelet leaves a cold streak across your face. It’s the way she looks at you, like you’re a fraction of a fraction of nothing at all, like you’re a grub in the dirt, like she wants nothing more than to clap you between her hands and make all your juices pop out of you. A splatter on the marble counter. The scariest part is not knowing how hot and how bright her frothing hate burns. It’s knowing that it’s barely being held back at all.

     “Don’t ever shear off that lovely hair,” she breathes.

     Her fingers tighten in your hair. You can feel the pricking of her sharp nails pressing into your scalp.

     “Okay,” you acquiesce through gritted teeth, “I won’t.”

     Sometimes it will be easier to let her think she’s won.

     She will hold an egg in her fingers and turn it this way and that, just looking at it. Then she splits it on the edge of the bowl and pulls the two halves apart, the yolk splatting into flour and sugar. Her red lips curl in satisfaction.

     “Don’t you just love the sound it makes?” she’ll ask you, but mostly herself. “Sounds so _alive._ The crack as its life spills out. Isn’t it poetic?”

     You will just keep chopping tomatoes.

     “Hand me the vanilla.”

     You will just keep chopping tomatoes. You can feel her staring at you, but the _tunk-tunk-tunk_ of the knife hitting the cutting board is the only thing keeping you calm. She clears her throat as she’s wiping flour from her red apron, red like her dress, red like your skirt, red like the tomato juice staining your fingers.

     “I swear,” she will grumble. “Why don’t I smack your ears til your eardrums pop, then we’ll see if it’s so funny to pretend not to hear.”

     Your stepmother reaches across the cutting board to snap up the dark vial, and as you’re taking a deep breath and your blood is heating up with familiar frustration and you’re about to grab another tomato to dice into bits, you lift your knife up too quickly and nick the underside of your stepmother’s arm. 

     For a moment all you can hear is static and the sound of your own chest. There is something like a scream from your stepmother, more akin to a wail, and your eyes will drop to where she’s slapped her gold-bangled hand against the wound. You drop your knife, and as the world of sound is beginning to creep back to you, your stepmother will strike you across the face.

     “I’m sorry!” you’ll shout, that desperate deer-in-the-headlights cry that has never saved you before and will not save you now. “Are you okay? I didn’t mean – I –  please, let me –”

     You’ll scramble to clean the cutting board, to take a cloth and wash the knife, but your stepmother will only shriek at you to _drop that glubbin’ thing at once_ and your hands will be trembling with the anticipation of another slap. As you’re fumbling for anything at all to occupy your hands and you’re entertaining the idea of groveling on the linoleum, your stepmother snatches up the knife herself. She points it at you evenly, her chest heaving with rage. The pearls around her neck sparkle.

  
     A servant whirs into the kitchen. “Is the Baroness in distress?” it will chirp.

     “ _Out_!” she’ll scream. “Out, you load of worthless bolts!”

     The servant whirs back out of the room with a forlorn, mechanical beeping.

     “ _You_ ,” she will hiss, a low and poisonous snarl. “You have no idea what’s good for you, do you? Animals with no sense of self-preservation all end up the same. That’s what you are, isn’t it? A wild animal, runnin’ amok in the home I built for you.”

     You will stare down the length of the knife, your shoulders shaking. She won’t stab you, could she? Would she? You take half a step back, and she takes half a step forward. You can hear water boiling over on the stove.

     “What is –  what is –” you will manage to choke out.

     Your stepmother follows your eyes to the edge of the knife, where there’s a streak of fuchsia smearing the blade.

     Then she tosses it across the kitchen. It strikes a glass cabinet and clatters to the floor. Your stepmother nabs you by your white collar.

     “I’m sorry! I swear, it won’t happen again!” you’ll wail.

     She’ll cackle, a hollow and substanceless sound.

     “That it won’t, you wrigglin’ little maggot.” She will yank you hard by the collar and drag you out the back door, across the expanse of grass that itches your ankles through your slippers. When you trip on a hole dug by some groundhog and fall to your knee, your stepmother will snatch you up again by the arm and nearly yank it from its socket as you make your way to the woodshed.  
     “Please, you don’t have to do this, I won’t tell, I’ll sleep in the doghouse –”

     Your stepmother will whirl to face you as your standing in front of the shed, then backhand you again. The diamond on her ring finger scrapes your cheek, and despite yourself you’ll cry out.

     “Tell anyone what?” she hisses.  
     “I – I don’t –”  
     “Tell anyone _what_?”  
     “Nothing,” will come your defeated murmur.

     Your stepmother will stare at you hard in that way of hers, the way that makes you think she’s picking you apart. This is a familiar look, the one that made you think that somehow, your stepmother could read your mind. When you shared a room, you would hum a song inside your head so you wouldn’t think of something that would make her angry.

     “That’s what I thought,” she’ll say.

     Then she opens the creaking door to the woodshed and tosses you inside. You’re rubbing the back of your head from where it’s slammed against a watering can when you hear your stepmother locking the door from the outside.

     It will be the middle of the night before you get any company.

     You’ve learned to make the woodshed more accommodating over the years. Even John has helped, in the few times you weren’t able to mask his transgressions against your stepmother as your own. The work table has been cleared off so you can lie down on it, although it is still dirty and dusty and dotted with sharp spots where nails weren’t hammered down all the way. When you sit on it, you can look out the filthy window to the train tracks outside. The sill is lined with tiny flower pots that have flecks of dirt caked inside, scraggly roots of plants that died long ago. You will rest your head against the window and trace the pots idly with your hands.

     Some of these plants were yours, when you were very small and your stepmother was happy to have you out of the house for hours at a time. She couldn’t stand the sound of your feet running down the halls, your giggles and your shrieks of joy. But you don’t do that anymore. So you’re confined to the house, where she can keep an eye on you.

     It might be nice to try and garden again. Maybe you’ll be good at it this time.

     A slow train has been chugging down the tracks for the past half-hour. The cars are near empty, filled with hay and crates. You can spot the trees through them if you squint hard enough through the grime. Then you can hear a whistling over the train’s lonesome whining. You will think nothing of it until you see a man in brown boots and overalls jump out of one of the cars. He pauses to stretch his arms above his head, then yawns and begins to amble down the tracks in the same direction as the train, whistling all the while. A bag is slung over his shoulder, and he walks with slow, swinging legs. He has all the time in the world, it seems to you.

     You will tap on the glass before you have a chance to consider whether it’s a good idea. Not often do you find yourself meeting strange men and women. You are bustled out of the room when guests arrive, sent to tramp through the woods or otherwise throw a ball against your bedroom wall until a servant comes to ask you to stop. Like she’s ashamed of you. Like she’s scared they’ll spot the fear in your eyes.

     The man stops whistling and looks around, his eyes falling on the shed. He scratches his head under his hat, then mosies over at what seems to you like the slowest walking speed you’ve ever beheld.

     “Well howdy there,” he says with a tip of his hat. “Did I wake ya?”  
     “No, not at all.” You will shake your head. “What are you doing on the train?”  
     “What, you ain’t never heard of train hopping?” the man will drawl. He’s got a grubby, tired look about him, but then again, you’re looking at him through dirty glass.  
     You shake your head. “No. Where are you headed?”  
     “Eh, this puppy’s headed to Montan-ee. Then, we’ll see where the tracks take me.”

     This man does not strike you as very smart.

     “But, say, whatcha doin’ cooped up in there?”  
     Oh, _now_ he notices. “I’m being punished,” you will mutter.  
     The train hopper lets out a low whistle. “Don’t I know the life. Whatcha do, girl?”  
     “I got in a fight with my stepmother.”  
     He shakes his head slow. “Ain’t right how people treat them kids. How they supposed to learn if you don’t treat ‘em gentle? Tell ya what,” he says, “let’s bust you outta this joint.”

     You’re about to decline when he goes to the other side of the shed. You can hear the thumps of him hauling the plank of wood that keeps the door shut. It thumps in the grass, and a bit of moonlight spills through the door as it creaks open.

     “There, just takes a bit of elbow grease,” the train hopper will boast.

     You step cautiously into the night. The air feels amazing on your skin. Suddenly, you erupt into a fit of sneezing. He laughs a raspy smoker’s laugh as you pull a string of cobweb out of your hair.

     “Thank you,” you tell him meekly. It’s hard to meet his eye – his intense friendliness is more than you’re used to, and you aren’t sure how to handle it. “How did you get to hopping trains?”  
     “Started off in Alabam-ee. No prospects, no family. Well, I hops on a freight with about five other fellers and we start goin’ everywhere we can without gettin’ caught. Ain’t so bad. You gotta fight, sure, and some of those guys can be real nasty.” He pats his overall pocket. “Gotta keep a blade on you just in case.”

     Your mind flashes back to the fuchsia smear, the knife pointed to your chest. Or maybe it was just red. You’re not sure now.

     “Where are your friends now?”  
     “Two in the slammer, one in the ground, two in Milwaukee.” He shrugs sadly. “Long as you got your wits about ya, hoppin’ is fine on your lonesome.”

     You consider what life must be like for him, waking up to the wind whipping your hair. Not knowing where you are or where you’re headed, and not giving a damn about it either. It sounds frightening. It also sounds amazing.

      “Aw, see,” he chuckles as he points a dirty finger at your face, “that’s a look I seen plenty of times. You got what they calls ‘wanderlust.’ Like you gotta bust out and run as far as your legs will take ya. That’s what got me out on the tracks, too.”  
     You shake your head. “It’s not like that.”  
     “Tell yourself what you gotta!” replies the train-hopper with a tug on his overall straps. “Say, you don’t wanna hop up in the car with me, huh? Get a hoe or some of them cuttin’ shears outta the shed. Nobody’ll mess with ya if you pull _that_ out on ‘em.”

     You will become conscious of the fact that your face is very strained, and you’ll soften what is sure to be a skeptical grimace.

     “That sounds fun, um….”  
     “Buck!”  
     “Buck, but I have a brother at home. He’s four years younger than me. I need to look after him.”

     Like you can look after him when you’re locked in the backyard like a dog. You’re so dumb.

     Buck nods sagely. “Blood’s important. I respect you for that.” He thumps you hard on the back, which knocks the air out of you. “Sure you don’t wanna feel the breeze on ya for just a half-mile?”  
     “I’d better not.” You rub your cold arms and look back at the toolshed. “Can you do me a favor, Buck?”  
     “Sure, missy.”  
     “Can you lock me back in?”  
     He blinks at you and then shakes his head, laughing like there’s dust and ash in his throat. “You’re a little crazy, ain’tcha?”  
     You smile at him. “A little.”

 

     It will be dawn when you hear footsteps slushing through the dewy grass.

     You wake up with a rake propped on your side where it fell over in the night. Your skin itches. Everything hurts. You’re trembling with cold when the door is unlocked and John pokes his head in. 

     “Good morning,” he says sullenly. He looks as tired as you. It’s always him who lets you out of the shed, never your stepmother. He’s sent to do her dirty work.

     Your brother will pick the webs and dirt out of your tangled hair, holding onto your hand as you jump down from the workbench. Mourning doves will be cooing. The early light hurts your eyes when you step into it.

     “Breakfast is ready,” John will say in a flat voice. He keeps his hand on your arm, but he does not ask you if you’re okay.

     You suppose you deserve this for ruining his dinner.

     “Will you let me in a side door? I need to change out of this.” You scratch at your neck, your chest, your back, your arms. “I’m itching like crazy.”

     John examines you up and down, his eyebrows flickering upward. He takes your arm and turns it back and forth, and you think he’s looking for bruises, but it’s something else entirely.

     “Aw, Jade,” he says with pity, “you’re covered in spider bites.”


	6. 1924

     You will be fourteen and the house will be filled with the sound of your screaming.

 

     “Whatever! I don’t even _care_!” you will shriek in that shrill, hysterical voice you’re so ashamed of. “What’s the point if you give a damn _anyway_!”  
     “ _Don’t_ you turn your back on me!” your stepmother will shout after you as you storm out of the drawing room. The _tak-tak-tak_ of her heels on the wood will precede the feeling of her grabbing your arm and spinning you around like a puppet.  
     “Let go of me!” you’ll scream at her before she hits you across the face. 

     Somehow it never stops shocking you. Each time her hand meets your cheek, her jewelry is different. The sting depends on the size of her rings.

     You never mean for this to happen. You never want to buckle under the leaden weight of it, the hot and melting anger that runs through you like candle wax and hardens in your chest. You watch yourself from a bird’s eye view, how your hair flies out in wild strands, your trembling fists, the wet streaks down your face.

     It’s all very embarrassing. The Crocker Estate has gone zero days since its last accident.

     You will twist out of her grasp and throw yourself to the banister, your chest heaving with angry sobs. Your stepmother will lean against the archway and cross her arms, staring at you with her red fish lips puckered, unimpressed. Light spills into the atrium from the skylight above. Dust motes sink in the air.

     “You _promised_ me no boarding school,” is all you will manage to rasp. You wipe your face with the heel of your palm. “We shook on it! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”  
     “Frankly,” she says as she examines her sharp nails, “no.”

     Fresh anger will boil over and spill out of you. Shaking with the force of it, you lash out and knock over the first vase within reach. It wobbles off the edge of the hall table and shatters.

     “I _hate_ you!” you scream at her. 

     Your stepmother stares at you. You stare at your stepmother. Your stepmother’s mouth forms a perfectly furious O.

     You will be in the process of scrambling up the staircase when she yanks you back by your braid and seizes your wrist to keep you upright as you fall backward. You flop pitifully, your legs limp as you allow her to hold you up with her hand.

     “Stand up! Stand up, you pitiful thing!” she hisses. She forces you to your feet and squeezes her hand tight around your wrist. “ _Whale_ , are you still eeling like a tough lil gill? Still big and bad and rebellious, huh?”

     You wince as she breathes on your face. The smell of her is sharp, like perfume masking something salty and wet, like her slick and slippery voice. Anger loosens the buttons of her careful accent, unraveling into something strange and foreign.

     “Go ahead, make my bay, angelfish. You think you know what you’re doin’, but you’re tidally in over your head.”  
     “Say… say whatever–”  
     “Huh?” your stepmother will hiss. She’ll yank you up higher and her nails will be digging into your flesh and you’ll be holding back your whimper as pain shoots down your arm. “Whatcha say? Can’t hear ya!”  
     “Say whatever you want!” you spit, “I still hate you!” 

     Your stepmother’s face goes pale, then flushed pink. Then she twists your wrist until it cracks.

 

     “Stop!”

 

     Your stepmother will straighten and look up the stairs, where John is looking down on you from the landing. Halley whines at his side. You curl up on the floor to make yourself small, willing him not to see you.

     “Go back to your room, buoy,” your stepmother will warn.  
     “No, you’re hurting her!” He leaps down the stairs, Halley in tow, and drapes himself across you as a shield. “I’ll get her out of here. She won’t bother you anymore. Just leave her alone, _please_.” 

     You will not look at her, but you can hear her silent snarl as she considers whether or not to kick him out of her way. Halley will growl, perhaps as she raises a hand to hit him. Then you hear the _tch_ of resignation as she whirls on her heel and strides out of the atrium. You will not look up at your brother until the sound of her footsteps is far away.

     “I’m sorry.” You cradle your burning wrist. Numbness spreads to your fingers. This time, you will not be able to help but cry.  
     “Whatever.”

     It hurts worse than your wrist.

     The whirring of a servant can be heard down the hall. It bumbles into the atrium and halts in front of you.

     “May I be of assistance?” it chirps.  
     “Jade needs a cast for her wrist,” John says. “And we need that vase swept up,” he adds with a gesture behind him.  
     “Certainly, Master John,” it says as it extends a long broom and dustpan from its arms. “Will that be all?”

     John casts a look at you, and with the shame of your outburst creeping up on you, you will have to look away.

     “That’s all, thanks.”

 

     Later, when you’re lying face-down in bed with your wrist wrapped in plaster and you’re beginning to fall asleep to the sound of rain pattering your window, there will be a flurry of knocks on your door. 

     “What do you want?” you shout into your pillow.

     The door flies open, and John storms in. He crosses his arms in that way he does when he’s trying to be taken very seriously. You shift to look at him with your blurry vision. He swipes your glasses off your writing desk and tosses them at you. They hit you in the nose.

     “Look out the window,” he snaps.

     You rub your wet, tired eyes and climb out of bed. You have to lean across the desk to really see what’s out there, past the sleeting rain and the waving tree branches.

     “What am I looking for?”  
     “Look at the flagpole.”

     You squint. There’s a blurry white shape moving ‘round and ‘round the flagpole.

     “Is that…?”  
     “She tied Halley out there!” he hisses. His cheeks are flushed with anger, and the scariest part is that you don’t know who he’s mad at –  her or you.  
     “How long has it been?”  
     “Since it started to rain, I think. So, hours.”  
     “Oh, damn it all.” You drag your hands down your weary face. “We have to go get him!”  
     “No duh, dummy!” says John with a stamp of his foot. “Time’s a-wasting!”

 

     It will pelting down rain when you run across the back yard to untie your dog. 

     He howls with each low rumble of thunder, pacing back and forth until the chain can’t stretch anymore. Halley is thrashing his head back and forth to wiggle free when John reaches him first.

     “Shh, boy, settle down. We got you,” he says as he fumbles with the chain. His hands are too slick to budge them. You wipe the streaks of rain off your lenses and push him out of the way.  
     “Here, just keep him calm and I’ll break the padlock,” you grumble.  
     “How are you gonna do that with your wrist, stupid?” he snaps.  
     “With this, idiot!” you snap back. You pull a bolt cutter out of the pockets of your dress.  
     “Where the hell did you get that from?”  
     “None of your beeswax!”

     You take the cutters and try to get them around the steel of the padlock binding the chains together. Halley wails as a crack of thunder sounds overhead. John wraps his arms around the dog’s neck, petting his thick, wet fur.

     “Damn it, John, will you hold Halley still?”  
     “I’m trying, but I wouldn’t have to if you hadn’t gotten him into this in the first place!”  
     You’ll bare your teeth at him. “And just what do you mean by _that_?”  
     “This is your fault, Jade! Stuff like this _always_ is!” 

     A flash of white lightning rips across the sky, washing everything in harsh light.

     “This is _her_ fault,” you say slowly, your voice low and dark. “Mother tied him out here, _not_ me. I do _not_ control what she does.”  
     “Well it certainly doesn’t help when you make her mad, huh?” John looks up in exasperation, his eyebrows furrowed as fat raindrops run down his glasses.      “Confound it, Jade, do you know how easy our lives would be if you just did what she told you and kept your mouth shut?”

     You will be stunned near silence. You stare at him with your mouth gaping stupidly open like a fish. Rain runs from your scalp down your face.

     “You have got to be pulling my leg, John. You’ve got to be… I don’t believe what I’m hearing!”  
     “Well get used to it, Jade, ‘cause I’m not a baby and I’m not dumb! I see how it goes between you two! How many times do you think she’s punished you for no reason?”  
     “But you… John, you cannot possibly think it’s okay what she’s done to you, either. You don’t think you deserved the woodshed, did you? You don’t think you deserve getting _blood_ drawn by her jewelry?”  
     “Because I was a kid, Jade, and kids do stupid things! It’s a grown up’s job to punish kids when they do bad stuff. So yes, I deserved it!”  
     “She’s insane, John.”  
     “You hear what you want to hear.”

     Oh, how badly you want to hit him in this moment. You want to tug on both his ears until he hollers.

     “And what about all the times I’ve stuck my neck out for you?” you will shout at him.  
     “I never asked you to,” John spits back, “and now we’re even.” 

     This cannot be happening to you. Not after all you’ve done for him, your baby-not-brother, the little boy you’ve lived for. You can’t be hearing this, this terrible knowing that you are not a team, that it is no longer you and him against the big bad Baroness. You feel like all your insides have been scooped out.

     Hot tears will spill out and you will be so thankful for the rain. “You can’t really mean that, John,” you whisper in a cracked voice. “We’re supposed to be a _team_.”

     John wipes his sleeve across his glasses and glares at his muddy knees. Halley lets out a low howl of terror as thunder rumbles overhead, closer this time.

     “Yeah. Yeah, we’re a team. ‘Cause I do what I say I’m gonna do.” He holds Halley tight around his neck and holds him back with all his ten-year-old strength. “Now cut the darn dog loose, would you? Before we all get pneumonia.”  
     You sniff hard, snot running down your chin. “Okay. Okay. Here goes.” 

     You will have to squeeze the bolt cutters until your hands are red and stinging, tears will spring to your eyes as your freshly fractured wrist stings with resistance. But the padlock will heed to you, and when the chains plop to the grass your brother will yank them from Halley’s neck. Your dog shakes himself hard, spraying you both with rain and musty dog smell.

     “Good boy Halley, good boy.” You’ll allow yourself a smile as Halley slobbers on your face.

     John leads him by his collar to the back of the house, where he’ll be able to take shelter inside of the screened-in patio. You will both be up to your shins in mud, and inside the dark patio you and John will stop to shed your shoes and socks.

     “All I’m saying, Jade, is that if you gave a hoot about either of us, you would try to be kind.”  
     “Kind,” you blurt.  
     “Yeah. It’s easy – take it from me.”  
     “And exactly how do you think I should do that, Professor?” you will retort as you stuff your socks into your ruined shoes.  
     “You could start by apologizing.” John wrings out his socks and puts his muddy shoes under his arms. “Just a suggestion.” 

     Apologize. He must be simple. How many times have you uttered desperate, useless apologies? But you will just nod, because it hurts too much to know that John sees you as more of a threat to his happiness than your stepmother.

     “Okay. I’ll try kind.”

  


     It will be after the sun has set that you find yourself outside of your stepmothers dressing room.

     For a while you’ll just press your head to the wallpaper, fighting the urge to bash your forehead against it because you can’t believe you’re doing this and you can’t believe he let you talk you into being so dishonest with yourself and you are going to get in _so_ much trouble when she even _sees_ that you went to her wing of the house.

     Down the corridor, a servant whirs to a hidden panel in the wall and disappears with a stack of wet towels from your stepmother’s indoor pool. The wall revolves to close once again, and the mechanical thump causes the dressing room door to creak open just a sliver. The tinny sound of some strange, discordant music floats out. You hear the clatter of a hairbrush being put down, the clinking of a makeup brush plopping into its porcelain container. A nasally laugh, and the voice of your stepmother – “ _don’t know what he’s carping aboat, shoulda been done a hull of a lot schooner if you ask me–_ ”

     Good grief, if you’re going to do it at all you might as well do it now. You straighten up, brush the wrinkles out of your dress, and go to the door with your ears buzzing with dread.

     Then you will knock.

     The tap of your knuckle against the door allows it to open further, and with your eyes still cast down to the floor you can hear a jump and a gasp, the sound of something being dropped.

     “Sorry,” you start, “but can I talk to you for a minute?”

     Then you look up to gauge how angry she looks, and what you see isn’t at all what you were expecting.

 

     The woman at the vanity has a wild mane of black hair that spills across the floor in tendrils. From her crown of hair sprouts a pair of glossy horns, Crocker-red and pumpkin-orange, ragged at the edges like they were once much longer. Her skin is a silvery shade of gray dotted with speckles of pink and fuchsia.

     You will stare at the gray woman, and the gray woman will stare back at you.

     “And just what the shell do we have here?”  
     “Who are you?”  
     Again with the nasally laughter. “My guppy thinks she’s so clever. Come here, angelfish,” she beckons with her finger.

     Something outside of your control drags you across the threshold and towards the gray woman. She holds her hand out to you and you take it, watching how she runs her sharp nails over your skin. Between her fingers, you can see the flexing of pink-tinged webs.

     “Kelp me understand what’s goin’ on here, little gill,” she says sweetly as your fingers tremble in her hand. “Water you doin’ in Stepmother’s wing, hm?”  
     “I wanted to –  I wanted to – um,” you bleat with your eyes on your slippers. You will be too scared to look around you, or what’s making the bubbling sound of boiling water somewhere nearby. “What I mean is, I’m sorry for earlier. It wasn’t –  right,” you choke. Forcing the words to come out makes you feel like you’re swallowing vomit.  
     “Oh? And you thought you’d apologize by comin’ where you don’t belong, huh? Traipsin’ through Stepmother’s halls without even thinkin’ about it.”

     Your stepmother will squeeze your hand. You’ll allow yourself a quick glance at her face. What to focus on first, the jaundice-gold of her eyes or the flaring of her fishy nostrils? The twitching, pink-webbed fins framing her face or the shark-tooth shape of her teeth as she grins at you? Her mouth flickers to a snarl when she sees revulsion on your face.

     “My, my. You must be whale and truly sorry.” 

     You’ll try to tug your hand out of hers, but she’s standing before you can make a break for it.

     First, she snatches you by your hair. You yelp and curl yourself into a ball after she throws you to the floor and presses her foot to your ribs.

     “Please don’t,” you blubber with your cheek against the carpet. “You have to believe me, I was just trying to make things right.”  
     “Who put that idea in your head, hm? You?” Her clammy palm presses your face so tightly to the floor that you can’t open your mouth to talk properly. “Or maybe the buoy? He want you to play nice?” Her claws scrape your skin. “Little shrimp always had his head screwed on tighter than you.” 

     From your position on the floor, you look around wildly for anything you could grab –  even kicking something over could buy you the time to scramble out the door. With your glasses askew, half of the world is clouded over. You see a mirror rimmed in pearlescent seashells, cages hanging from the walls, draped with gilded chains and filled with white creatures that hum and hiss and flap their wings.

     “What do you think, Agent? Do you think we should keep her?” your stepmother laughs.

     You see the smooth, black feet of some short-statured creature waddle into sight. Its ankles are jointed like a doll’s.

     “That is at Her Condescension’s discretion,” comes a trilling beetle-voice. “Do you wish for a drone to dispose of the girl?”

     Your chest feels like it’s going to pop.

     “No. No, she wants to stay here. She wants to keep playing house with us.” Your stepmother will stroke your hair, her long nails tearing through the tangles. “So you’ll get your way, angelfish. You can stay right here, right where I can always see you.”

     Your stepmother seizes you by the shoulder and flops you over so you’re staring up at her. Her gray hand angles your chin this way and that, batting her eyes at you with her feathery, pink lashes. Your wrist throbs with dull pain.

     “Now, water we goin’ to do about that sharp anemomemory of yours?” she clucks to herself.

     Something like a devilish idea makes her yellow eyes widen, and a smile splits across her face. Your stepmother hooks the front of your dress and pulls you up. When she claps her hands together twice, the thing with a beetle shell takes your arms and twists them behind your back. You’re shoved out of the room as Her Condescension strides out of the room and down the dark corridor, the moon casting her tall shadow against the wall. You stare at the back of her head, at all the masses of curling black that seem to breathe in and out with each step. Doors are open on either side of you, unveiling rooms with computer screens, rooms with tubes of murky water and dark figures clouded behind the bubbles. Jars upon jars of things floating in brine, rooms of thick cables that hum and crackle with electricity.

     “You want to see it?” she shouts behind her. “I’ll let you see it all. Go ahead and get your fill, guppy, ‘cause when I’m done with you ain’t no one gonna believe you.”

     At the end of the hallway there is a thick, fuchsia curtain tied in golden cords. Your stepmother will throw the drapery open, and what you expect to be a window that she will then toss you out of instead leads to a room humid and steaming. You shake your head as your glasses fog up, sticking the loose strands of your hair to your forehead.

     There’s a thing like a beehive in front of you, pulsing and dark, hissing with the bubbling of something sour apple green, slimy and thick as fondue. A thin spiral staircase leads up to it –  it must be something like a pool. Your stepmother will grab your arm by the elbow and push you up the stairs, frogmarching you with your bad wrist behind your back. When you reach the top of the beehive-thing, your stepmother will force you to your knees. The smell coming off of the slime is sharp and bitter –  you almost choke on it.

     “Nothin’ like a lil sopor to wipe the slate clean,” your stepmother titters.

     You can feel the black silk of her bathrobe fluttering against your skin. She squeezes you close to her so your wrist is pressed against her stomach. Then she holds your jaw so tight that it hurts, and with the sparkling jewel on her middle finger she draws a long cut across your cheek. When she takes her hand away, you can see the beads of your blood.

     “Go on, angelfish. The water feels fine.”

     Your stepmother digs her claws into the back of your head and dunks you into the shrieking-neon slime. It burns your face, it feels like fire, and when you open your mouth to scream it all pours into you.  
  


_T-t-t-t. Tap-tap-tap._ “How did it go?”

     It will be late when you hear John’s Morse on the other side of the wall. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know how you got into bed.

 _T-tap-tap-tap. T-tap._ “Jade?”

     Gingerly, you lift your hand and stroke the burning cut across your face. The pain takes the breath out of you. There is an iridescent sheen on your fingertips like the wings of a scarab beetle, like the dull rainbow in a puddle of kerosene. Touching your face again, you will scrape something like a green scab from your cheek.

     John keeps tapping on the wall until he isn’t anymore. You lean over the bed and throw it all up.


	7. 1926

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the next chapter - 1927 - is the last chapter you will have to read if you want to skip the majority of her life and head straight for end. go ahead and skip from 1927 to 1996, but i will know if you clicked the chapter index and i will be judging you.
> 
> no i wont. i dont really care.

     You will be sixteen years old when you meet the devil face to face.

 

     Servants do not clean the kitchen anymore. It’s a task delegated solely to you, you who needs some other productive way to occupy her fiddly-hiddly hands in the nighttime hours, some way to make sure that when you stagger up to bed you will not entertain girlish thoughts of tapping on the wall to gossip about nasty untrue things. She makes you take out the pots and pans and scrub them until they shine. She makes you polish the silverware. She makes you shine the good china, and then wipe the glass cabinets they live behind. She makes you wash and dry and fold the tea towels, the kitchen rags, the rug she tramps flour and sugar into with her kitten heels. You wash the dinner dishes, the dessert dishes, towel them dry, set them away. You scrub the inside of the sink, the microwave, the refrigerator. You chisel away chunks of ice taking up space in the freezer, then kick the ice under the fridge. You scrub the spaces between the linoleum tiles with a toothbrush. You scour the marble countertops in sweeping motions that make your arms hurt.

     You do all of this until the sky turns dishwater gray, and then you are permitted to stumble out of the kitchen and towards the promise of your bed.

     It will be one such morning when this horrible thing happens to you. You will rub your bleary eyes with hands that smell of rubber and soap, latch onto the banister and begin to haul yourself up the stairs. And then you will hear something like a crash in the parlor, something like a teacup falling over and being crushed underfoot. And because you know you will be blamed for it if you do not sweep it up – or else Halley will be, which will also be your fault, because Halley is your pet and girls should control their pets – you mutter all the swears you can think of and plod to the source of the sound.

     The parlor will be quiet. There’s the quiet ticking of the grandfather clock, the steady thumping of the water heater under the floorboards. You tread carefully across the Persian rug, skipping over the spots in the pattern that you know will whine and creak if you step on them.

 

     You gasp and shiver with realization when you run into your father. Colonel Sassacre stands before the fireplace, his stiff hands frozen in a position like he’s speaking to someone. You avert your gaze from his glassy marble eyes. Looking at him will make you feel like you’re going to be sick. You can see the black ends of the thread keeping his mouth shut, even through the wires of his facial hair.

     He looks like the stuffed deer heads that dot the hallways upstairs. You shudder and turn away from your stepmother’s trophy.

     “ _Halley?_ ” you whisper into the dark.

     No answer. There’s a crackle on your tongue like electricity, and when you lift your nose to sniff the air you will smell something candy-sour, something metallic.

     Oh, and there it is. You round the red settee and find the fragments of a teacup and saucer beside one of its mahogany legs. You crouch down to pick up the chunks of porcelain. There are still droplets of bitter, black coffee pooling in the pieces. A dark stain of it is sinking into the rug. You will swear again, out loud this time. You pile the broken pieces into a sharp stack that prods your fingers and rush out into the back hall.

     The gray light of morning hasn’t touched this slice of the house yet. It’s dark as your free hand cautiously traces the wallpaper. You plan on passing through the mud room and dumping the pieces into the compost pile by the back door, but of course, that was the plan before a burst of red and green and orange and purple light comes exploding out of the cloak room.

**GIRL.**

     Pieces of porcelain shatter on the floor, coating your slippers in their dust. You throw yourself back against the wall, tripping backwards over yourself to get away from where the neon light touches.

**I HEAR YOU, GIRL.**

     A gigantic hand, green and veined, grips onto the door panel and splinters it with the weight of its owner pulling itself into the hall. Vomit-sour-electric-yellow-green floods your vision and makes you blind, makes you gag, makes you feel for the closest escape. Your hand finds a gap in the wall, and you will tumble back into your stepmother’s parlor.

     You will be under the coffee table when the demon clambers into the room.

     Its body trembles with something that must be electricity, the skull of its head trembling as it jerks side to side. Its mandible opens wide, hisses with static shock, chatters closed again.  The golden-blind-shine of its peg leg stomps so close to your face that your glasses bounce further down the bridge of your nose. Then the scraping of its horrible claws above you.

**HA, HA. YOU ARE NOT THE GIRL. I WAS EXPECTING.**

     The demon flicks the coffee table over with one finger and leaves you exposed, crouching like a child in the middle of the rug. As it hovers its hand above you, you will scramble on all fours behind the settee.

**LOOK WHAT SKAIA DRAGGED IN. YOU MUST BE. THE LITTLE WITCH.**

     The demon takes your hair between its two fingers and yanks you out of hiding. You claw at its green skin, and it laughs at you with that rumbling sound that knocks around inside your head. Red and purple and yellow and green will bounce off of every surface in the parlor, stinging your eyes. Everything looks the same. You can’t get your eyes to focus on a way out.

**ARE YOU THE ONE WITH THE DOG. OR THE ONE WITH THE BOY.**

     It pulls you up by the hair, sparking pinpricks of tears in your eyes. It breathes its breath of dirt and ash on you, a reek like an old basement. Your first instinct leads you to shove your palm against its golden fang, as long as your forearm and gleaming neon. The demon’s whole skull jitters with static and unleashes a terrible, quaking laugh.

**THE WITCH WITH THE BOY, THEN. THE ONE WITH THE DOG. HAD GUNS. AND MORE MOXIE. THAN YOU.**

     The demon will drop you on the carpet, and as you start to run headlong in the opposite direction, it traps you with the breadth of its palm. You smash against it, stagger backwards, and end up running into its other hand. It laughs as it boxes you between the arms of its overcoat, like a kid with a magnifying glass, cackling as the ants burn on the concrete. The flashing, quilted panels on the hems of its sleeves burn searing blocks of color behind your eyes when you squeeze them shut.

**TELL ME, SPACE-WITCH. IS YOUR MOTHER HOME.**

     “ _No_!” you’ll spit. You duck under its overcoat sleeve, rough like the felt of a pool table, and throw yourself towards the entryway. The demon will snatch you by the ankle and jerk you back. You fall hard on your tailbone, yelping from shock.

     The demon stomps towards you on its peg leg, then on its huge, clawed foot like an alligator. Something slips off the mantle and breaks. Colonel Sassacre falls over on his mount and thumps against the floor, his pointed hat rolling under a chair. The demon lowers its face to you, a foul vapor exhaling from the nostril-hole of its skull. In your panic, it will take you several moments to realize that the demon’s eyes are flashing pool balls, pulsing in a spectrum of colors each time its eyeballs rattle around in its head. A leathery, reptilian tongue snakes out and brushes your hair.

**THEN WE WILL PLAY TOGETHER. UNTIL SHE RETURNS.**

     “ _English_!”

     A grumble of interest comes from the demon’s throat. It straightens up until its shoulders are crushed against the ceiling. You will feel a clammy hand on your arm, and suddenly your stepmother is standing between you and the beast in the parlor.

     This will be the only time in your whole life in which you have been glad to see your stepmother.

     “You’re crossin’ a line, English. Don’t toy with my children unless you want a dead timeline on your hands.”

 **ONE IN A MILLION MILLION. IS OF NO CONCERN TO ME. IF YOU FRET FOR YOUR HIDE. THEN LOCK UP YOUR CHILDREN.** The demon’s skull jitters with a pulse of electricity. Like one of John’s wind-up chattering teeth. **I TOLD YOU TWO SWEEPS. IT HAS BEEN TWO SWEEPS. I HAVE COME TO BE IMPRESSED.**

     A snarl hardens your stepmother’s face. There’s a vein pulsing in her neck that you’ve never noticed before, and while you’re staring up at her she turns around and looks at you with an expression you have never seen before and will never see again.

     Fear. Your stepmother –  troll queen, sea monster – is afraid. Even now, as her nails dig into your sleeve and smart against your skin, her hand is shaking. You will feel as though you’ve seen a fish walk out of water.

     “ _Go_ ,” she hisses. “You will sit in the hallway and wait for me, and you _will not move an inch_.”

     She pushes you hard toward the entryway, and your legs feel like jelly as you stumble away from the flashing light.

 

     The sky will be a dirty, washed-out blue when your stepmother is ready for you.

     Colors pulse behind your eyes, and no matter how hard you rub your temples, the needle-sharp migraine doesn’t go away. You’re cuffing your hands over your ears to ease their aching when you first notice the clicking of her heels. Your stepmother crouches in front of you and pulls your hands away from your face.

     “Look at me,” she orders.

     Your blurry eyes look into one pupil, then the other. The image of her is doubled, two stepmothers venn-diagramming atop each other. She angles your face this way and that. Then she uses her thumb and index finger to force your eyes open, her lips parted as she scrutinizes them.

     “What are you looking for?” you slur.  
     “That’s none of your concern.”  
     “Is there something wrong with me?” you ask in a low murmur. “Did I have a seizure?”  
     “I told you that’s none of –”

 

     Your stepmother’s voice cracks, and she inhales sharply. She drops her head so she’s just staring at her lap, and for a moment she will simply crouch there, face in her hands. You sit and stare down at her, your clenched fists bunching up the skirt you never got the chance to change out of.

     Then she raises her face and narrows her eyes at you, the familiar look that you’ve come to fear, but this time the fear doesn’t stick. Because you’ve seen the panic in her eyes, the twitch in her jaw, the trembling of someone utterly out of control.

     Your stepmother is terrified of the neon demon, and that makes you a little less afraid of her.

     There must be something in the way the corner of your mouth flickers, a twinge of relief in your eyes, because when your stepmother stands and points for you to leave, it’s not up the stairs to your bedroom. It’s out the front door.

     “Come with me, guppy,” she says in a stony voice. “I have something to show you.

 

     The car will take you across the train tracks, back into the treeline where morning light only comes through the branches in gray smatters. Each time a wheel runs over a deep mud puddle, you bounce in your seat and grip onto the door handle. Eventually the engine will stop and the servant driving the car will hop out. There’s a sound like a rusted gate opening, and when you peer out the window you see it’s the entrance to Plantation Lake.

     You will shoot your stepmother a questioning glance. She will simply give you that tight, closed-lip smile.

     Further down a gravel road the black car will drive. The path is uneven; a horrible mechanical thumping makes you grit your teach each time a tire bumbles over a cluster of rocks. Then you hear the engine cut, and your stepmother motions for you to step out.

     Plantation Lake is bigger than you thought it would be.

     It stretches across for at least a half-mile, surrounded by languid weeping willows that brush the water with their branches. Weeds tickle your legs as you approach the shore, pebbles and shards of broken glass crunching under your shoes. Your reflection warbles on the gray-green surface.

     “What is a mother, Jade?”

     Your stepmother stops just behind you. You turn from your wiggling reflection to study the look on her face. But you can’t discern anything from it. She’s just staring out over the lake, her arms behind her back.

     “A mother is… a woman who raises children,” you falter.  
     She blinks slowly, her lips a thin, red frown. “A mother does whatever is best for her children. She protects them. And in return, they must never, _ever_ turn their backs on her.” She looks at you like an afterthought. “A long time ago a meteor crashed from the sky, and where it destroyed the earth, I filled it with water until it was full. And then, when the second one fell, I filled that one, too.”

     The meteor flashing across the sky, its long tail staining the expanse of blue. _John._

     “This lake,” she continues, gesturing to it lazily, “is evidence of when _I_ became a mother. Now, this lake is the home of _my_ mother.”

     You look at her with furrowed brows, confused. She smiles serenely.

     “Watch closely, angelfish,” she says as she points ahead of you. 

     A rustling in the line of willows. A band of black figures emerge from the drooping branches, uncanny and stick-thin. Your eyes widen – the beetle people! With their combined strength, three of them haul something over their heads and dump it into the water. You catch only the glimpse of an antler before it’s submerged – it’s a deer carcass. After the body sinks, the glassy surface of the lake erupts in bubbles. A slimy, white tendril pokes out of the water and disappears. Dark billows of blood disperse through the ripples.

     “Lovely,” she says to no one. “But it’s just krill to her. She could alwaves stand to eat more.”

     She pushes you to the water, and you gasp as it splashes your socks. Her hands are at your shoulders, your throat, massaging you with the tips of her pointed nails pricking your skin. Your nostrils fill with the scent of salt and brine.

     “Look at her, Jade. Look at her and learn.”

     There’s a hollow echo under the waves, mournful as a whalesong, and all at once you see the clouded, white shape of something truly massive under the lake. Waving tentacles that splinter like tree roots, twitching and wriggling and stained with algae and blood. Water slides off of its head when it breaches the surface. White and slick, it’s the color of candle wax with a beak like an octopus, rows of sharp teeth and misty eyes that blink with a sort of thick film. Its skin undulates, as if inside the skin it were filled with mostly air.

     hello, my sweet gill,  it whispers into your head like a bad thought, worming around in there with the fear and the panic. i’ve heard so much about you.

     You jerk back, but she’s gripping onto you tight, her hands digging into your neck. Your stepmother is speaking into your ear now, her lips brushing your hair.

     “Do you really think I need _you_ to catch that meteor? Look at what I’ve done, look at what I _will_ do. You’re nothin’, guppy, a speck of a speck of a speck, and ain’t no one _ever_ gonna notice or care if I make you into chum right now. Do you think it’d matter to me? Do you think it’d matter to Skaia?” Her fingers press against your voice box.

     she’s bluffing, hatchling, comes the voice from the depths. she will never admit it, but she needs you.

     “I–” you choke.

     so call her bluff.

     “John will notice,” you stutter. “John will care.”

     This will take her off guard. You feel your stepmother’s hands loosen.

     “Go back to the car,” she says.  
     “But y–”  
     “I gave you an order.” Your stepmother steps out of one heel, then the other. “Do as you’re told before I change my mind.”

     good job, hatchling. i’ll take care of her from here.

     As the car is rattling away down the gravel road, you press your hand to the window and watch your stepmother standing on the shore. She shrugs out of her skin, brown folds collapsing at her feet like a rubber costume, black hair bursting forth in every direction. Then she walks into the water until the tips of her horns disappear.

  


     You will sleep until three in the afternoon, and by the time you’re dressed John has long since made his bed and wandered away. You will find him in the library, taking up a whole table with his _Daunting Text._ Playing cards are scattered on the floor, and a wind-up set of teeth chatters across the table.

     “Finally,” he says without looking up.  
     “What are you doing?”  
     “What’s it look like?”

     The book your father wrote is almost the size of the table, with faded brown edges and musty pages that reek of dust. The weight of it makes the table legs groan when John moves it. You wander behind his chair and peer over his shoulder.

     “... _that will be up to your Father. Perhaps he will discuss it with you one day, when he and you are ready. But it is your journey I am writing about to wish you luck. There will come a day when you will be thrust into_ – hey!”  
     “Don’t be nosy!” John snaps at you. He leans over the book and shields the page with his arms.  
     “Did Mother write that? It looks older than both of us.” John is scrawny enough for you to yank his arm back and reveal the aging, looping cursive written on the front page. It’s addressed to him, that’s for sure, though you can’t see the signature. “What’s a ‘kernelsprite?’”  
     “Would you buzz off?”

      You start scooping up cards off the floor. “Were you planning on playing with these?”  
     “Solitaire.” He flips a page. “Was learning how.”  
     “You must not be very good at it.” You bend down and pick up a Joker that’s found its way under the table. “Wanna play gin rummy?” 

     He allows you a flicker of a glance. Twelve years old, he hasn’t yet learned to make himself look convincingly mad at you when he really isn’t. He scrambles his cards into a messy pile and shuffles them into a stack.

     “Where were you?” John asks. He reshuffles the deck for what he will tell you is good measure, but is really because he likes to show off all the different ways he can do it. The cards make a satisfying page-turning noise between his fingers. “You smell like fish.”  
You rest your head in your hand. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

     He thinks he’s so subtle about rolling his eyes at you, but you notice it clear as day. It makes you want to kick him hard in the shins.

     “Try me,” he sighs as he begins dealing cards. He smacks them to the table hard enough to tell you that you’ve already annoyed him.  
     “John, I know you think that because you’re all grown up you can write me off, but I have never lied to you.” You snatch up your cards and fan yourself with them. “If you told me right now that Bigfoot came through your window last night and taught you how to speak French, I would believe you. So I expect you to return the courtesy.”  
John stares at you hard with his bushy eyebrows furrowed, then smacks a card face-up in the discard pile. “If you’re trying to make me feel bad, it’s not working.”  
     “Oh, confound it John, why would I be trying to make you–” you groan and smack your forehead. “John, I don’t ever want to hurt you. I don’t want _anything_ to hurt you, and, well, if that lands me in hot water, then so be it.”

     John doesn’t respond at first, so you start paying attention to the game long enough to add the card from the discard pile to your hand.

     “What is it, then, that you’re trying to tell me?”  
     “All I want is the benefit of the doubt. I just need you to support me. That’s all.” 

     Your brother will make an annoyed sound in his throat and toss another card. He rearranges the ones he has in his deck, and you look away when you see that his whole hand is showing up in the reflection of his lenses.

     “You know, ‘supporting you’ has the unfortunate side effect of making our lives a hell of a lot harder.” This doesn’t sting as much as it used to. You try to shrug it off. Before you can open your mouth, he blurts out, “I’m sorry. I do try, you know.”  
     “You ‘try.’” You will snort to yourself. “You just ignore what’s happening around you. If she told you you were living in the doghouse from now on, you’d say, ‘well gee willikers Mother, Halley sure does need my bedroom more than I do!’ You’re just – you’re just complacent.” 

     You will regret saying this as soon as it comes out. Your face flushes red when John puts down his stack of cards.

     “I win,” he says.

     And there it is. His card is a perfect run of diamonds, Ace through ten.  You throw your cards down.

     “You cheated.”  
     “I did not. It was a magic trick.” John scoops the cards up again and shuffles them so hard that a few fly out of the deck. He’ll grab them quickly and shove them back into his hand. “Wanna see another one?”

     How could you possibly tell him about the neon demon, the monster in the lake, how your stepmother lives underwater and breathes like a fish. John has seen what the truth has done to you, he’s seen what resistance and free will is rewarded with in this house, and he doesn’t want it for himself. You tried very hard to make him understand the rules, to make him part of your team, but he carved out his own rulebook for himself. You’ve been on different paths for a while now, each angry with the other for choosing the wrong way to survive. 

     But you can’t follow John’s rules, and he can’t follow yours. Your brother knows what’s best for him, how to avoid trouble, how to skate under the radar. He’s the jokester to your sourpuss, a real up-and-coming comedian who even manages to make the servants laugh –  a function you suspect your stepmother programmed specifically for him. He’s all joke books and playing cards and magic hats, rabbits and wands and flowers that squirt water. He’s the pranks to your punches, the trickster to your tantrums. Everything that lodges itself into your head and infects you with bitter hatred just slides right off of him. You guess you should be proud of him. You didn’t turn out the way your stepmother wanted you to, and John shirked your expectations, too.

     His method might work yet. But your stepmother is growing weary of you. She might have really pushed you into the lake today. Or maybe she wouldn’t’ve. Time has made you privy to the waxing and waning of her whims, but more and more often you find yourself guessing incorrectly.

     You won’t last much longer like this. Something has to be done.

     “Jade?”

     You will look up at John and notice that your eyes are glazed over with tears. You wipe hard, feigning drowsiness.

     “Sure. Show me what you got.”

     Your brother spreads the deck out in front of you.

     “Pick a card, any card.”  
  


     Later that night, you will ask a question that’s been on your tongue for a while.

 _Tap. Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap._ “John?”

     He gets out of bed quickly this time. Reading Sassacre’s _Daunting Text_ under the sheets with a flashlight, probably.

 _T-tap-t-t. Tap._ “Yes?”

     You exhale through your nostrils and bonk your head against the wallpaper. Sleep has evaded you, and in your restlessness you have found yourself slumped in the corner of your room.

     “John, will you run away with me?”  
      _T-tap T-tap-t._ “Are you joking?”  
     “No,” you murmur aloud.

     A long pause from the other side of the wall.

     “Jade, open your window.” 

     The window squeals when you manage to push it halfway open. Parts of it have been painted shut, and flakes of white paint fall like snow to the sill. Autumn air pricks you with goosebumps. You pull your nightgown tightly around yourself as you poke your head out. Something rattles as it clinks against the side of the house –  it’s the swaying of a tin can telephone on a string. He swings the tin can towards you. You latch onto it and use your desk lamp as an anchor to twist your side of the string, redirecting your voice around the corner to his bedroom.

     “When did you make this thing?”  
     “A while ago.” John falters. “Was waiting for a good opportunity. Guess now is as good a time as ever.” 

     You set your elbow on the sill and pinch the bridge of your nose.

     “John, I’m placing a lot of faith in you by telling you all of this, so just hear me out, okay?”

     You can hear the rustling on the other end as John shifts to sit underneath his window.

     “Sure, I guess.”  
     “John, our stepmother is an alien. Or a monster. I’m not sure which.”

     There’s so much quiet from the other line that you think John must’ve snipped the string and gone to bed. You will be about to open your mouth when he finally says something.

     “Okay. You have my attention.”

 

     Why bother to preface it at all? Nothing will make it more believable. You blurt it all out at once –  the demon named English, your mother’s disguise, the sour slime she dunked you in. The tyrian smear on the knife, the thing called Skaia, the writhing beast in Plantation Lake. The rattling pool balls, the burning neon, how a sea monster spoke into your brain. The white animals in cages and the things in murky jars. The hidden ship and the beetle people and the drones and your stepmother’s pungent fear. You spit it out before he has the chance to stop you or question you or even to tell you that you must be lying, that you’re hysterical, that you’re doing this for attention and you’re just mad because Stepmother loves him and not you. 

     “She’s going to kill me, John. If nothing else, you have to believe that.”  
     “Well,” John sighs. “I guess you have a point.”

     Your heart leaps.

     “I mean….” He sighs. “Jade, do you think anybody else has what we have? I mean, servants with metal parts, and big giant drones? I’ve thought about it before, but… none of it’s in the newspapers. People’s houses look different from ours. People in magazines don’t have robots.”  
     “No, John. I guess they don’t.”  
     “I don’t think you made it up, Jade. You’re really creative and everything, but it takes a lot of time to come up with a story like that. I don’t think you’d go that far just to make me look stupid.”

     Yes, yes! This is all you’ve ever wanted to hear.

     “But….”

     No, no! Nothing but ‘but!’

     “What?” you will blurt out too suddenly, too desperately.  
     “How do you plan on getting away with this?”  
     You drop your voice to the deadliest whisper you can manage. “Every night a passenger train passes us by. Sometimes the cars are open –  I’ve seen train hoppers jump off for a quick stretch and throw themselves back into another car. Hardly any security roams around down there, not if they have no reason to. We’ll leave out the back door and jump on, and by the time Stepmother wakes up we’ll probably be outside state lines.”  
     John sighs into the tin can. “Jade, I have no doubt you’d be able to get away with a stunt like that. It’s the craziest idea you’ve ever dreamed up, sure, but you could still do it.”  
     “You’re going to say ‘but’ again, aren’t you?”  
     “ _But…_ I’m not like you, Jade. You could survive out there on your own, but that’s not me. I’d just drag you down.”

     You will lean out the window and look towards his bedroom, but the string is pulled taut across the sill. He’s sitting on the floor, then. He can’t even face you.

     “You’re not even willing to try?”  
     A sigh, and you can tell he’s rubbing the back of his neck in that anxious way he does. “Jade, if our stepmother is really as bad as you say she is, do you really think she should be left out here with no one to watch her?”  
     “And you think _you’re_ the one to do that?”  
     “What, like I’m too little to know what I’m doing?” he bristles.  
     Your chest feels tight. “I’m sorry.”  
     John taps his fingers irritably on his side of the string. “You’re still gonna go through with it, aren’t you?”  
     “Come with me,” you breathe, “I’ll protect you.”

     Something will change in his voice. It goes low and serious –  you can almost hear the furrow of his brow.

     “Like you always have?”  
     “Of course, John. Of course I will. I’ll look after you.”  
     “With what money? With what anything?”  
     You blink in confusion. “We would figure something out.”  
     “Jade,” he says in that gentle voice, the way that he does when he tries to let you down easy. Your mouth tastes like bile. “I won’t stop you from leaving.”  
     “But you won’t go.” It’s not a question.  
     “No. I won’t go.” 

     You feel like you’re going to be sick.

     All you will manage to say is, “Okay.”  
     “Can I ask one thing?”  
     You stare at a spot in the floorboard until it begins to look like a face. “Yes.”  
     “Please don’t take Halley with you.” 

     Halley. Halley, who is so old now that his bark is like an old man’s cough, who hobbles because one of his back legs hurts him. Halley, who is still so fluffy but whose fur is going gray, his head held lower, not quite as proud as he used to be. His tongue lolls out of his mouth like a habit now, his black eyes tired and droopy. He can’t run anymore, not like he used to. Even the jump from the floor to the end of your bed is sometimes too much for him, so he lies on your rug with his long tail thumping, pawing in his sleep at your bed skirt. You wouldn’t even be able to haul him onto the train.

     You hope he’ll find it in his heart to forgive you.

     “If that’s what you want.” Resignation makes you feel like you’re sinking. “Fine.”  
  


     One week later you will run away.

     You lie under your bed sheets for hours with your clothes and your shoes still on, a packed canvas knapsack tucked under your wardrobe. Waiting for the train to come, for the first mournful whine on the horizon.

     Will it be like _Huckleberry Finn,_ you wonder, or more like _A Room With a View_ ? Maybe even a _Tess of the d'Urbervilles_ if you get off on the wrong foot. You thought about packing books, but ultimately you decided to hold onto the necessities. Just housework blouses and skirts without silk, a pair of work boots. Your mother of pearl hairbrush wrapped in the pair of denim pants you are only permitted to wear when you deadhead your stepmother’s garden in the blazing summer months. A stick of gum you’ve been holding onto, a set of your brother’s Bicycle playing cards. The handkerchief you use to clean your glasses. Pencils and paper, a screwdriver and a wrench and a pair of gardening shears. A green apple and a bruised pear.

     In the distance you hear the train call. You throw off the sheets and click the door closed behind you.

     Before you creep down the stairs, you knock softly on John’s bedroom door. You hear the soft creaking of his bare feet on the floor, the gentle sound of his hand resting on the other side of the door, but he doesn’t open it. He rests his forehead against it and whispers to you.

     “Are you leaving?”  
     “Yes.” You pause. “It’s not too late.”  
     “You made the right decision for yourself. This is the right decision for me.”  
     You trace the wood grain of the door with your fingertips. “I’ll come back for you.”  
     Maybe it’s doubt that makes him sound so bitter, or just anger at you for giving up after all this time. “You should get going if you don’t want to get caught.” 

     Your rest your hand on the crystal doorknob, toying with the idea of throwing the door open and embracing him, your baby-not-brother, the little boy you’ve always loved before yourself. You think of how he would freeze up in your arms, how he would pull away from you, twelve years old and headed in the opposite direction. How it all slides off of him, even your love. All your years of work have not been enough to make him want to leave with you.

     This is the right decision, he says. Living with the Baroness is better than depending on you.

     But who are you to judge? Loving your brother was not enough to make you stay behind for him. You’re both insane in each other’s eyes.

     “Goodbye, John.”  
     "Bye.”

 

     You will slink down the stairs in the way you’ve mastered, like a pianist hitting the right keys. Dancing back and forth across the steps, avoiding all the places where the wood whines underfoot. The house is dead quiet. You hear the ticking of a clock, the thrumming of crickets in the front yard. Padding into the parlor, you hear the steady thump of Halley’s tail beating the floor. You come across him lying around the Colonel’s feet before the mantle, where the fire has been put out hours before. He looks at you and yawns.

     “Hi, puppy,” you whisper as you rub his belly.

     He flops lazily on his back, raising his paws so you can get all of his itchy parts. It makes your father bob back and forth on his pedestal. He never quite recovered from being toppled over by the demon named English. A fine line of stitches goes down his face where some of the stuffing came out.

     “You’re going to be very angry with me.”

     Halley whines and curls up again, snuffling as he rests his snout on his paws.

     “You’ll think of me, won’t you, boy? I’ll be thinking of you.” You stroke the silky fur of his floppy ears.

     But of course, Halley says nothing. You will stand again and look down at him with the threat of tears. He was the Colonel’s dog before he was yours, a polar bear cub twice your size. You used to ride on his back around the yard. Now you’re leaving him behind, too.

     You kiss your fingers and rest them in the dip of Halley’s skull.

     “Be good, boy. I’ll miss you.”

  


     You haven’t been able to walk down this back hallway since you ran into the demon. You feel as though at any moment, a burst of neon might pour out of the nearest door and blast you to bits. So to calm your nerves, you will begin counting backwards from ten under your breath.

     “ _Nine… eight….”_

     The clock in the parlor strikes the hour. Its shrill tune startles you, makes your heart hiccup with fear.

     “ _Six… five….”_

     Again you will hear the whining of the train, louder this time. Any moment now it will make the house rattle with the sound of its passing. You creep down the hall quickly now, aching for how the air will feel when you launch yourself out the back door.

_"Three… two….”_

**Halt.** comes a voice like thunder, deep and gravelly and unfamiliar.

     You bump into the metal carapace of a drones.

     All at once its body will light up electric, crimson Crocker red crackling down the plates of its armor. It leans down toward you, its beetle horns gleaming and sharp.

**Unauthorized presence. You have been identified as: Jade Crocker. Prepare for intervention.**

     When have you ever heard one _speak_? You duck out of its grasp as it lowers to grab you by the back of your collar. Then you will slide between its tree trunk legs and leap out the door, bounding out across the back yard in zig zags.

**Halt. Unauthorized presence.**

     It makes a sound you don’t recognize, like water boiling crossed with a balloon being inflated. A rush of white-hot stuff like lightning blasts pasts you and scorches the grass. You tumble to earth, rolling away from the hot stench of burning earth. The sound starts up again. You heave yourself to your feet and fly across the grass, your knapsack banging hard against your spine with every stride. Again, the drone will discharge the cannon in its arm and detonate the ground beside you. You leap over the smoking patch and run in an uneven, jerking beeline toward the chugging train. You can see inside each individual car, it’s so _close_ , if only you could–

**Jade Crocker, halt. Prepare for intervention.**

     Overlapping voices now. You turn to allow yourself the barest glance, and your face pales when you see the swarm of drones coming out of the house in clusters. They emerge from the roof, from behind trees, from dark shadows the moon doesn’t touch. You shriek and shield your face when a cannon blast melts a chunk of the iron fence between you and the train. Your boot brushes the oozing metal when you vault yourself over it, burning a small hole in the toe. When you make it to the other side, you land so hard that you will have to use your hands to keep yourself up. Gravel scrapes your palms.

     The train is faster than you expected it to be, much faster than the one Buck jumped out of for his nighttime stroll. You run hard along the track, coils of hair sticking to your sweaty forehead. Your boots crunch hard against the gravel, the muscles of your legs burning. Finally, you will catch up with an empty car filled with stacks of straw bales. With a final effort, you throw yourself headlong into the car.

     Your body hits the wood hard, and immediately you will wretch with the taste of dust and hay in your mouth. Your knees feel scratched. Scrambling to your feet, you edge yourself to the side of the car and look out behind you. There’s no sign of the drones anymore –  maybe you’re outside of their radius.

     The train is quickly putting the Crocker estate behind it, but from here you can still see that John’s bedroom light is on. The house you grew up in, the house that was larger than life, the house you never left – the whole thing is fast becoming a black speck. And you’ve left your only brother behind.

     Oh, God, what have you done?

     You press yourself to the wall and cover your face with your hands. As you think you might begin to cry, an awkward cough and a murmur catches your attention.

 

     “Uh, you okay miss?” comes a young voice.

     You jolt to attention, your hand flying to your bag for the garden shears or the wrench.

     “Whoa, hun, no worries,” comes another, nasally tone. “He didn’t mean to scare ya. It’s just, we heard the shots outside, and wondered….”

     As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can finally discern the shapes of three young boys perching amidst the hay. One has a mane of curly red hair squashed under a blue cap. Another, the shortest one, has a face pockmarked with pimples, dressed in dingey overalls and who probably weighs even less than your beanstalk of a brother. The last looks like he’s in charge. He’s as old as you, maybe a year or two older, with oily black hair and narrow eyes. His elbows rest on his knees, staring at you with something that isn’t hostile, but disinterested nonetheless.

     You push up your glasses. “Sorry to interrupt.”  
     The pimply one laughs, a squawking guffaw of a sound that takes you aback. “Shoot, not every night we get a girl to join the party.”  
     You stand and adjust the strap of your knapsack. “I can leave the party just as easily.”  
     The train hopper with red hair tries to backtrack. “What Ragweed _means_ is that we been gettin’ tired of seeing each other’s same old sorry mugs day in and day out. It’s nice to meet someone new.” He nods to you. “My name’s Jackson.”  
     “I’m Ragweed!” pipes the short one.  
     “Damn it, Ragweed, she _knows_ that, I just told her,” snaps Jackson.  
     Ragweed jerks his thumb to the boy who’s still staring at you. “And that’s M–”  
     “I’m Marlowe,” quips Marlowe. He nods at you slightly, or maybe he doesn’t. It’s hard to tell with the rattling of the train car. “Let me guess.”  
     “He’s good at guessing,” blurts Ragweed. Jackson hushes him.  
     Marlowe will keep staring at you with his black eyes, his greasy hair flopping in front of his face. “I’d say it was your mom what drove you out of the house.”  
     You will feel a chill run down your back. “Yes.”  
     “You been to school?” asks Jackson.  
     “Tutored. At home,” you snap, unsure of why you’re so defensive.  
     “Got anything good in the bag?” squeaks Ragweed.  
     You start to hug your knapsack suspiciously. Marlowe waves the other two boys off.  
     “Don’t mind them,” he says. “They only got one light bulb between the two of ‘em.” 

     You can’t help cracking a smile.

     “Where are you headed?” you ask. Marlowe smirks at you at the same time Jackson and Ragweed murmur something about how educated you sound.  
     “We started in San Fran,” he says. “Though we been campin’ out here for a while to fatten our pockets a little. Final goal is Chicago. The city’s blowin’ up. We’re lookin’ to get a piece of the action.”

     Chicago. They could be hopping trains for weeks. Nameless boys no one cares about, who no one will look for. Faces that disappear in a crowd. These boys may be your perfect escape.

     “Got room for a fourth?”

     Ragweed and Jackson elbow each other excitedly. Marlowe smiles at you in a sort of curious way, unsure what to make of the wild-haired witch who flew in from the countryside.

     “For as long as you can tolerate us,” he drawls, “welcome to the group. What can we call you?” 

     One more time you will look behind you, and you won’t be able to see the house anymore. All you can see is a blur of trees, and suddenly you will be seized with something like joy, something like regret. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

     “Jade.” You tuck your hair behind your ear. “My name is Jade. Do any of you know how to cut hair?”


	8. 1927

    You will be seventeen when you go back for your brother.

 

    It’s been four months since you left the Crocker estate, four months since you stopped bathing regularly and changing your clothes as often. You’re aware of how ripe you smell as you climb the wall to the second floor window. 

    Far below, Ragweed and Jackson will whisper a back-and-forth idiotic argument as they hold the lattice steady for you. Melting February snow makes it hard to get a steady grip. Your boots scrape against the wood and cause the whole structure to warble, and you curse to yourself. You’ve gotten very good at cursing.

    You will throw your arm against the windowsill to give yourself some leverage, grunting as you haul yourself up to peer into the window. The curtains in John’s room –  what you hope will  _ still  _ be his room –  are half-drawn. You see the cloudy shape of his dresser, the reflection of light off a framed painting on his wall. You’ll grasp onto one of the iron bars now installed over all the windows, the ones that must have cropped up once you fled the coop. Your hand just barely fits through them, so you knock softly on the glass.

    Then you knock again. And again. Finally, you see the bed sheets shift as your brother climbs out of bed. Your heart leaps when you imagine how surprised he’ll be. 

    And then your heart sinks when he recognizes your face and merely frowns.

    John pushes the window open and stares at you evenly. One hand stays atop the window, ready to push it back down.

    “Well,” is all he will say.  
    “I said I’d come back for you,” you blurt, flustered. “So here I am.”  
    “I never told you to do that, Jade.”

    He sounds so  _ angry  _ with you.

    “You didn’t think I’d just disappear without a trace, did you?” You’ll try to laugh him off, but he just keeps glaring at you. “What, you thought she’d just let us be penpals?” 

    John pinches the bridge of his nose. When he raises his face, you can see the shadow of a bruise under his eye.

    “You have no idea what’s gone on here since you left, Jade.”  
    “What happened to your face…?”  
    John’s hand flutters under his eye. He turns away so you can’t see the fading mark. “What happened to your hair?”  
    You blow a curl of hair out of your eyes. “I, um… needed it shorter. My friend cut it for me.”  
    “Well, isn’t your life exciting now.”  
    “John, why are you so angry? I’m trying to help you.”

    Your boot slips on the lattice, making your heart hiccup. Down below, you hear Ragweed yelp with indignation after Jackson hits him.

    “Oh, right. You still think you’re helping.” The little vein in his temple is popping out now. “Jade, do you notice anything different about the house?”  
    “There are….” There’s no way you’re getting out of this easy. You will swallow the lump in your throat. “There are bars on the windows.”  
    “There are bars on the windows. What else?”  
    “It… looks like she….”  
    “What do you think she did, Jade? Hm?”  
    You will not be able to look him in the eye. “She struck you.”  
    “Yeah, she seems to really like doing that lately. Guess she missed you that much.”  
    “This is  _ exactly  _ what I’m trying to save you from. Pack up a bag and let’s go! One of my friends is your age – you’re not too young for this. I’ll help you, we’ll  _ all  _ help you. They’re the reason I was even able to get up here.”  
    “Jade.”  
    “I don’t understand what you think is keeping you here. We can bring Halley with us. Do you–”  
    “Jade!” John shouts. Then he grasps his hair and sighs, exasperated with himself. “Jade, she killed Halley.”

    It will take a few moments for his words to sink in. You just stare at him stupidly, your mouth hanging open and your mind full of nothing. You will feel as though you could let go of the bars and fall to earth without a fight.

    “What?”  
    “It was about a month after you ran off. She stopped letting him come inside, but it kept on snowing. I had to go out and feed him in the doghouse. He could barely stick his head out. I told her his bones were aching and he needed help, so she told me to bring him in. She took the ground-up beef from lunch and told me she was mixing medicine into it, then gave it to me to feed him. He barely got two bites in before he started throwing up. His mouth was foaming.”  
    “She poisoned him,” you’ll breathe.  
    “Yeah. And she made me feed it to him. I just… stood there and watched. We both just sat and watched him die.”  
    All at once you will become aware that tears are streaming down your face. They drip off your chin and tickle your jaw. “John, I’m so sorry.”  
    John wipes his nose quickly, glaring off into the corner of his room. “Do you know why I always did as she said?”  
    You will open your mouth, then close it again. “Why?”  
    “You thought  _ you  _ were the one looking out for both of us, picking fights with her and resisting everything she told you because you thought it was ‘righteous’ and ‘just.’ But it never helped you, it just made life awful for both of us. I got on her good side because I knew it was the only thing stopping her from shipping us far away from each other, or  _ worse _ . I was the good kid because I wanted to her to have a reason not to kill us. I was the good kid because I didn’t want her to kill  _ you _ .”

    Your stomach roils with acidic shame.

    “Fat lot of good it did me then, huh? I spent all that time keeping my mouth shut and doing things I didn’t want to do because I was sticking my neck out for you, and it didn’t even make you stay. And now my dog is dead, and I’m here all alone.”  
    “You don’t have to be,” you murmur, your voice cracking. “I don’t want you to be alone. Come down with me,  _ please _ .”

    There will be a brief moment where you think your words may have made an impact. John stares down below, his face soft with sadness. His hand twitches at the window, then he shakes his head.

    “I told you before, and I stand by it. Our stepmother is insane. Certifiably off her rocker. But she needs someone like me to keep her grounded. If it was just her and her robots in this house, well, who knows what she’d do?”  
    “John….”  
    “Dad’s book said I’m supposed to go on a journey, but I don’t think this is what it meant. I think I’m supposed to wait. So I’ll keep being the good kid. I’ll do what she says. I won’t fight. I won’t raise my voice. I’m going to make this house a peaceful one. I’m going to make her change.”  
    “The book? You….” You shake your head. “And then what, John? What do you think you could  _ possibly  _ do to change her?”  
    He’ll shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I’ll be satisfied if I know that I at least tried.”

    Oh, John. Your baby-not-brother, the little boy you wanted to teach everything you knew. He’s so much smarter than you now.

    You will feel both pride and terror.

    “You’ve really grown up, John.”  
    “Yeah. Well, someone had to.”  
    This will sting more than you’ll want to admit. “Okay. I deserve that.”

    To your surprise, you’ll draw a smile out of him. John laughs a little.

    “I think you should get out of here,” he says. “Before the drones get wise.”

    Maybe they already know you’re here. Maybe your stepmother is watching all of this on her big computer screen, sipping tea and watching her little boy break your heart. She must be so happy.

    “Stay safe, John,” you’ll whisper as you prepare to climb back down the lattice. “I’ll be thinking of you.”  
    “Thanks for… coming back,” John replies as he rubs the back of his neck. “I’m… glad you’re okay. Just don’t do anything stupid.”  
    “Name one time I’ve done something stupid,” you joke, and the two of you with smile with a twinge of sadness, a twinge of discomfort. “When do you think we’ll see each other again?”  
    John bites the corner of his lip. “I don’t know.”

    This, you’ll think, is a fair enough answer. But it will not stop you from wanting to cry.

    “Well.” You sigh. “This is it, then.”  
    “This is it… yeah.”  
    You let go of the bar across his window. “Goodbye, John.”  
    “Goodbye, Jade.”

  
  
  


    You’ll be down to earth again when you motion for the boys to follow you the way you came –  through the underbrush and back to the train tracks.

    “Is he meetin’ us on the other side?” squeaks Ragweed.  
    “No.” You brush the dirt from your pants. “He isn’t coming.”  
    “Ah, what the hell!” complains Jackson. “After we came all the way back here for ‘im? Talk about ungrateful.”  
    “It can’t be helped,” you snap. “And there’s no use bitching about it now. So let’s just hightail it out of here before we get blasted to bits.”

    You will be storming off to lead them away when you feel Marlowe grab you by the shoulder.

    “Hey,” he says. He tilts his head a little, the only trace of emotion you can discern from him. “You gonna be okay?”  
    You shrug him off and keep walking. “Yeah. I’ll be fine.”

    Upstairs, you hear the sound of John closing his bedroom window. Call it denial, call it optimism, but you will not allow yourself to consider what the future will hold for you and your brother. And despite the painful truth of it all, you will not allow yourself to accept that you will never speak to John Crocker ever again.


	9. 1928

    You will be eighteen when you learn to shoot a gun. And you really, really like it.

 

    Your first Luger will be a gift from Marlowe, a skinny little thing that looks like a peashooter. In the outskirts of Portland where the town trickles down to wilderness, you line up dusty Coke bottles atop wooden crates and shoot them off, one by one until each is shattered. You love the sound it makes, you love the smell and the grime that it leaves on your hands. Each time your pistol crackles and the gun recoils, you feel a little safer. You feel a little stronger.

    The real world will be confusing and dirty. It’s cold and it’s primitive and it’s lonely. Outside of your stepmother’s home, people live like animals. They’re unclean, they eat what feels like slop and gruel to you. It took you months not to get sick after eating. Life reminds you of John’s old storybooks of cowboys and Indians, of Davy Crockett and Robinson Crusoe. With your pistol on your belt, you can convince yourself that you’re the heroine of a dime novel, a blazing no-nonsense pioneer who spits and swears and eats squirrel soup. 

    Life is harder than that, though. You aren’t a heroine, you’re just a lonesome girl who doesn’t eat enough and hasn’t had a bath in a while.

    You will sometimes think that your new friends find you naive and spoiled. Unfit for the lives that have calloused their hands and feet, made them rough and gnarled like wild dogs. It only makes you want to be wilder, to be flying hair and snarling teeth and jagged nails. So when they send you into the corner store to distract the woman behind the pharmacy counter, you pester her for a bandage for the finger you sliced open before you entered the store. While you’re making sure to bleed on her counter, Ragweed and Jackson leave with bread and candy and packages of Hydrox stuffed under their shirts. 

    You have never had to steal before. At first it will leave a deep thumbprint of guilt in the back of your mind, makes you lose your appetite and toss and turn at night. Hunger, however, will be a strong motivator. You won’t feel as bad about it after a while. 

    In Spokane, you will untie a woman’s dog from a cafe fence so you can swipe what you can from her purse as she chases it down the sidewalk.

    In Boise, Ragweed will break his arm falling from a fire escape. You take him, pitiful and hobbling, to the Baptist church two doors down, where you will stuff the pastor’s Bibles into your bag as he’s phoning the hospital. You pawn them off as family heirlooms and eat like kings with the money. Jackson buys a banjo and teaches you how to play it. The calluses on your fingers harden.

    In Salt Lake City, you will fire your pistol in the air by the police station so when Marlowe and Jackson rob the tailor’s shop a mile away, they’ll be gone by the time an officer bothers to show up. You’ll spend two hours holed up in a garbage bin until the heat stops looking for you.

    In Denver, you will finally pawn your mother of pearl hairbrush.

    In Wichita, the four of you will be forced to jump from a moving train when Jackson pulls a knife on a man much bigger than him. The man punches him hard in the jaw, makes blood spray across the floorboards. You draw your pistol and you mean to fire a warning shot, but the train car rattles and you graze his arm instead. When you’re all leaping from the car and the man is yowling in pain, blood seeping through his dirty sleeve, you feel as though your heart will explode. Nightmares will plague you for weeks afterward.

    In St. Louis you will meet up with Marlowe’s older sister, a raven-haired girl with skin like a porcelain doll. You will sleep on the floor of her and her boyfriend’s downtown apartment, where a corner of the ceiling never stops leaking and the sound of police sirens wakes you up before dawn. His sister, Charlotte, is often angry with Marlowe and rarely speaks to him, but she indulges you in games of gin rummy and cuts your hair sharp and stylish in the bathroom. When you wake up gasping with fright in the middle of the night, she shares her blanket with you and brews you coffee. Her boyfriend even allows you sips of real gin, which he hides under the floor. You will not like Charlotte’s boyfriend because he is too ugly for her, and he doesn’t even make her laugh. Leaving St. Louis will be hard. You give Ragweed a black eye when he confides to you that he took a dollar bill from Charlotte’s purse.

    In Chicago you will feel out of place. Buildings are too loud, too pressed together. They amplify sound, so you feel trapped in a roaring box. Police are everywhere. Everyone has guns, and they can use them better than you. There are a thousand thousand children running around just like you, cold and hungry, who’ll sooner snap at your throat than let you edge in on their territory. Giant red spoons and your stepmother’s name are plastered on billboards and in department store windows, a bright and bloody red that makes you feel nauseous. You are a speck of a speck, and no one would care if you disappeared.

    So, in Chicago, you decide you will take your leave of your boys.

 

    “I’m gonna tell you a real important secret, Jade, but ya can’t tell anyone, else it’s gonna be my hide,” Jackson tells you as he loudly chews a sandwich.

    You’re sitting together on the edge of a fountain in Wicker Park, where Ragweed is sloshing his bare feet in the water to fish out pennies and nickels. It’s been days since you’ve decided that this city is not for you, that you don’t want to live like this anymore. So you slouch with your elbows on your knees, your face in your hand. Everything seems clouded by mist, a fog of disinterest and boredom that you can’t shake. You stare at the hole in the toe of your boot until your vision doubles.

    “Okay,” you sigh. A cigarette wobbles in the corner of your mouth – you’re too lazy to light it. “What is it.”

    Jackson balls up the wrapper of his sandwich and chucks it over his shoulder. It hits Ragweed in the face. 

    “Marlowe is – ah, shit, I can’t believe I’m tellin’ you this.” He drops his voice to a whisper. “Marlowe’s really uh, keen on ya. He’s gonna ask you to be his girl by Saturday, Friday even.”  
    You slowly pull a book of matches from your jacket pocket and light your cigarette. Then you’ll exhale a long stream of dark smoke. “Why are you telling me this.”  
    “Figured you had a right to know. I know you don’t like surprises. Seems like a pretty big surprise to me. Marlowe doesn’t like anything, s’far I can tell.”

    This will not be an unfair assessment. Marlowe expresses himself with the twitch of his lip, a twinge in his left eyebrow. You could probably count the things he likes on one hand. It will not occur to you to feel at all flattered. You are the only girl Marlowe knows. He doesn’t actually care for you, not in the way you’ve seen on screen. You’re no Joan Crawford, and he’s no William Haines. He’s just a boy your age who has confused your possession of womanly aspects with the possibility of romantic compatibility.

    Or maybe he just wants to touch your tits. By this time you will be plenty aware of how men look at you. It’s why you wear such a heavy jacket, even in May.

    Your eyes wander to the other side of the park, where Marlowe is leaning against a park map, taking slow and lazy puffs of his own cigarette. He sees you looking at him and nods slightly. His nonchalance, with his hand in his pocket and his ankles crossed one over the other, suddenly pisses you off. You can’t stand how little he cares. You can’t stand the meaningless, anonymous life you’ve carved out for yourself. You feel like you’re drowning.

    Jackson is staring at your clenched fist. “So uh… any thoughts on that… or?”  
    Agitated, you flick your cigarette to the ground and stomp on it. “He’ll be disappointed. That’s all.”  
    He blinks at you with wide eyes. “That’s cold, Jade. Marlowe’s been real good to you.”  
    “Whatever.” You slump forward again and rest your cheek in your hand. “He doesn’t know anything about me.”  
    “Like how you got no idea how to work a phone?”

    You tut and turn your glare somewhere else. Back in Wichita, Marlowe scribbled down a number for you and instructed you to go out to a pay phone to call his sister. Charlotte would hang up on him if she heard his voice first, he said. He stood by the phone as you picked up the receiver, chewing his gum like a cow gnashing at cud. Ragweed and Jackson exchanged an incredulous look when you turned the receiver over in your hand, a floppy thing on a cord like a filter funnel. You jabbed at the three on the wheel of white numbers, but nothing happened.

    “How do you work this thing?” you said with a sneer.  
    “You’ve never used a phone?” gaped Ragweed.  
    “Of course I have, idiot. Just not one so stupid as this.” There’s not even a screen on it – how are you to know if you’ve punched in the wrong number? It’s a clunky, unwieldy box of a thing, primitive and basic.  
    Jackson pushed you out of the way. “Criminy. Didn’t know it was brain surgery. Let me do it.”

    It embarrassed you to hear them titter to each other, the spoiled rich girl who fled a mansion and has never operated a telephone. Jokes were made regarding carrier pigeons. Like they have any clue what you’ve seen. No one in any of these cities has ever heard of a microwave. Your prized Luger wouldn’t even leave a ding in a drone’s armor.

    It’s around this time that it will sink in just how ahead of everyone else your stepmother is. She’s leagues beyond you, with technology no one could help to understand. No one but you, maybe. It’s around this time you will decide that if anyone is going to catch up to her, it will have to be you.

    “Tell me you’ll at least give him a chance,” Jackson says. You’re ripped back to the present. “We all owe him a lot.”  
    This much is true. But it doesn’t make you feel guilty. “I do owe him a lot. Not that much though.”  
    He whistles through the gaps of his two missing teeth. “You’re a tough customer, Jade.”  
    “Yeah, well. The next time you try to set me up with someone, put in a good word for me with his sister.”  
    Ragweed wades over to you with his pants rolled up to his knees. His pockets are wet from where he dumped fistfuls of coins. “What’re we talking about?”  
    Before Jackson can say anything, you blurt out, “I’m not staying here anymore.”  
    Ragweed blinks. “You mean you’re going back to the motel?”  
    “No, I mean….” You take off your glasses and rub your eyes. “I mean I’m leaving Chicago. I don’t want to be here.”

    The boys holler with indignance. His interest piqued, Marlowe steps on his cigarette and starts to walk over to you in that slow, strutting way that makes him look like a poser. 

    “You can’t be for real, Jade! Come on, after all the time it took us to get here?”

    Your face burns, but it’s not with embarrassment. 

    “Don’t quit now, Jade!” Ragweed squawks. “It’s not gonna be so hard for us soon. Marlowe’s gettin’ friendly with this guy in Hyde Park, makes white lightning with his brother. We help peddle it down the skids, we get a cut of the cash. Big bucks comin’ our w–”  
    “You shouldn’t be talking about that in public,” Marlowe drawls as he approaches. He rests one foot on the edge of the fountain and leans on his knee, so uncomfortably close to you that you can smell the reek of tobacco. You sneer and turn away from him. “Why’re you squealing like pigs out here.”  
    “Jade don’t wanna be here anymore!” Ragweed blurts at the same time Jackson wails, “She’s ditchin’ us, Marlowe!”

    A muscle in Marlowe’s jaw twitches. He looks down at you and tilts his head. “That true?”  
    You will only give him a brief glance. “Yes.”  
    The pitch of his voice doesn’t change, no anger nor sadness falls across his face. “Don’t run off without saying goodbye,” is all he says before he saunters away.

  
  


    In June, you will get on your first train that you actually have a paid ticket for. The inside of your knapsack is lined with paper bills, your pocket sags with the weight of dollar coins the boys gifted you with their faces sniffly and pathetic. The only one who doesn’t cry is Marlowe.

    This train is headed for Pittsburgh, the Steel City. You know it will be as dirty and loud as Chicago, you know it will be dangerous and rough. But you have to be free of these boys, who only know how to lie and to steal. It doesn’t make them bad people. Everyone has to survive, everyone has to eat. These boys, though, will keep you from doing what you know must be done. You can’t fight your stepmother or see your brother again if you’re stealing from corner stores and selling hooch to strangers. You have to make yourself legitimate, to justify the space you fill.

    Now the train is whining, a sigh as it puffs a cloud of smoke into the swarms of people waiting around. Union Terminal is a tin of sardines, too many people pressed together. You hug your knapsack close to you – you’ve pickpocketed enough times to know how to avoid someone like you.

    “Be safe, Jade,” Ragweed blubbers as he dabs at his eyes. “I’ll never, ever forget you.”  
    “What Ragweed means to say,” Jackson says in a cracked voice as he sniffles, “is that, uh, you mean a lot to us, and we’re glad you’re our friend, and, oh God, come here!”

    He hugs you for the fifth time in the past hour. The conductor will start to call out, so you pry yourself out of his arms.

    “You’ll see me again, numbskull,” you laugh. “I’ll forward a letter to the motel as soon as I’m settled.”

    People are pushing past you to board the train. You’re saying your last goodbyes and are prepared to hop aboard when Marlowe grabs you by the elbow. You jump, turning to look at him with what must look like anger. He stares at you evenly – just looking – then lets you go.

    “You’re gonna be okay,” is all he says.

    You stare back at him. He never tried to get you to stay, never pulled you away and asked you to be his girl like Jackson said he would. So if Jackson was telling you the truth, you suppose Marlowe has been very polite through all of this. You will feel something akin to gratitude.

    “I know,” you quip. “I always am.”

 

    Then you will get on the train with your whole life in your arms, your new life ahead of you and no plans at all.


	10. 1929

     You will be nineteen when you finally get a real job.

 

     Your apartment in Pittsburgh is a closet fueled by what money you had when you left. You eat crackers and Hydrox cookies for most meals, not because you can’t afford hot food but because you don’t want to squander what you have. Your first job is as a server at a cafe, where you never get tipped and people sometimes request to be serviced by someone else. You quit that job after a month. You delivered newspapers –  quit – cleaned hotel rooms – fired – tried and failed repeatedly to get any sort of administrative role in the steel companies that rule the city. Life is freckled with various humiliations, enough to make you long for the simplicity of a train car, but never enough to make you long for home. 

     On your way to pay your landlady, you will walk by a tower that stretches dizzily into the sky. It’s unappealing and plain, a sandstone-colored box that blends in with its neighbors. It has the hollow imitation of some Roman temple, with light carvings of columns and friezes. A bronze plaque is affixed to the brick, accompanied by a silhouette of a bell. It reads “The Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania.” You’re gazing up the skyscraper when a flustered-looking woman comes bustling out and rams into you.

     “Oh! Pardon me, miss,” she murmurs without really looking at you. Tight blonde curls frame her face, her lips a crisp red. You glance down and see she’s holding what must be her resume.  
     “Just had an interview?” you ask.  
     She eyes you, uncomfortable, and plays with her earring. “If you can call it that. Sometimes I really don’t know what they’re looking for.”  
     You give her a complacent smile. “Tell me about it. Let me guess – telephone operator?”  
     “Oh no, I… well, I just got out of secretarial school, and they had a job posted in the  _ Gazette _ , so….” she looks at her watch in a way that tells you she’d rather be doing anything than talking to the disheveled girl on the street.  
     “Good luck,” you’ll find yourself saying as she’s already bustling down the sidewalk, the  _ tak-tak-tak  _ of her high heels speeding away. God, what an awful sound. 

     You’ve already tried secretarial work, but you haven’t tried  _ here _ . You spit on your hand to smooth down your wild flyaways. Then you go inside with your head high and shoulders straight.    
  
  
  


     “Mr. Harrison can see you in just a moment, if you’d like,” snips the woman who gave you the paper application. 

     You will be in the middle of flipping through the packet with a growing feeling of dread. ‘Professional references?’ You hardly worked with anyone you can stand. The woman is staring at you through her cat-eye lenses. She will clear her throat, preparing to repeat herself, when you shake your head.

     “Oh, no, I… I don’t have a resume on me, and I hardly look… uh….”  
     “Miss, we had an applicant come in today with her skirt cut above her knees.” She gives you a quick up-and-down glance. At your scuffed Mary Janes, your pantyhose with a run down the left leg. You’ll toy with the sleeve button of your ill-fitting blouse. “I think you’ll do just fine.”  
     You’ve come to hate this kind of spur-of-the-moment thing. But you acquiesce. “If you insist.”

     The woman with the cat-eye glasses hands you a pen across her marbled counter. The air is dotted with the sound of so many typewriters. You crane your neck to see the lines of shiny desks behind her, of all the woman punching away at their keys.

     “I suggest you fill it out quickly. Mr. Harrison doesn’t take well to dawdlers.”  
     You swallow the hard lump in your throat. “Right.”

 

     Mr. Harrison’s office looks like your stepmother’s parlor. You will try not to stare at the intricate crown molding, taking great care not to track dirt on the dark green carpet. He doesn’t look at you as he’s bumbling and humming over a stack of papers, but when he finally gives you a passing glance, it will be one of incredulity. 

     “You’re applying for the operator position?” he asks with one bushy, white eyebrow raised.  
     “Uh, secretarial,” you correct. You’ll tug nervously at the hem of your skirt, unsure whether or not to cross your legs.   
     Mr. Harrison takes your application from you and skims it like a loose advertisement in a magazine. “You went to secretarial school?”  
     “No.”  
     “Worked in an office before?”  
     “Office adjacent.”  
     “You can at least type quickly, yes?”  
     “It’s been a while.”

     He closes his eyes for what seems to be a very long time, then blinks them open again. You will begin to feel as though the woman with the cat-eye glasses has purposely set you up for humiliation.

     “Well…  _ Jade _ … we don’t provide job training for these positions. Prior experience or schooling is the expectation. So you can imagine that we usually don’t hire girls of your, er, backgr–”  
     “Do you have a phone in here, sir?” you suddenly ask.  
     Mr. Harrison rubs his temple. His eyes flicker to the phone behind him. “Naturally.”  
     “I may not have been to school for this sort of thing, or for anything, but I’m very good with technology. I used to build my own radios.”  
     “That’s an interesting anecdote, but it hardly has anything to do with the positi–”  
     “Sir, what would you say if I disassembled that phone and put it back together?”  
     Mr. Harrison sighs and seems to look around his desk for anything that might get you to leave. He shrugs his shoulders in a resigned way. “I’d say anyone could disassemble a phone with a hammer and determination. Reassembly takes more smarts. So, I suppose I’d be impressed.”  
     “Impressed enough to consider me for a position?” you press. “Any at all. I know I’d be valuable here, I just want to prove to you that I’d be a good fit.”  
     He runs his hand over his sparse, graying beard and sighs. “I don’t see why not. After all, if you screw it up, I can always get a new one by the end of the hour.”

     You stand up so quickly that the front legs of your chair wobble backward. Mr. Harrison gives you a look like a gaping-mouthed fish when you pull a screwdriver out of your purse.

 

     In five minutes you will have Mr. Harrison’s desk covered in the wires and cables and switches that were once inside of his telephone. With the sharpened tip of a pencil, you point out all the little things you find wrong with the pieces.

     “Your terminal board is looking rough,” you murmur with your face an inch from the desk. “And your line switch is too loose. Just for starters. Can’t imagine this thing will last you to next year with the state of the lead cables, anyway.”   
Mr. Harrison leans back in his chair, his large arms folded across his chest. He looks like a walrus. “And what might you suggest?”   
     “Well, at the very least you should have a phone with buttons. This rotary business is nonsensical,” you snort. You begin to place the terminal board back inside the phone’s base. It’s like putting together a puzzle you’ve already done. A place for everything, and everything in its place.  
     Mr. Harrison busts into loud laughter. “How might you suggest we implement that?”  
     His utter confidence in being right only makes you smile. “Oh, easily enough. Give me a pen and paper and I’ll have a blueprint for you within the week.” You feed the cords carefully through the tall candlestick shaft of the phone. “Really, we should be far past this model by now. It’s as if I’m handling a child’s toy.”  
     “You’re suggesting that our expert engineers and manufacturers have failed to come up with ideas that seem obvious to yourself?” Mr. Harrison says blankly.  
     “Exactly, yes.” You tighten the screws on the back of the telephone. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

     He rubs his moustache, squinting at a corner of his desk as he considers, you’re assuming, whether to call security to escort you out.

     “When did you say you could have that blueprint?”  
     “Within the week,” you reply with your best fake smile, your hands folded in your lap.  
     He laughs and shakes his head. “Let me ask you this. Where do you see yourself in five years?”  
     You tuck your black hair behind your ear and bat your eyelashes at him. “As your boss’ boss.”

     This time he can’t help but laugh at you in the condescending way you have long since become familiar with. It grates on your ears, but you don’t stop giving him that serene smile.

     “I can’t say you haven’t made my day more interesting,” he says as he’s wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. “Welcome aboard, Miss… uh.” Mr. Harrison picks up your application and eyes it. “What was your last name?”

     You don’t even have to think about it. It comes to you naturally, flashing neon and gold. The name that your stepmother will be confronted with when you finally beat her at her own game. The name that will make her fear you.

     “English,” you reply. “My name is Jade English.”


	11. 1933

     Your name is Jade English. 

 

     You live in a very tall city rowhouse sandwiched between its painted neighbors, though you sleep most nights at your office. You can count to the first three hundred decimal points of pi. Your favorite color is green, but mostly you wear lab whites. You’ve thought about keeping pets, but you wouldn’t be home to look after them yourself, and they’d just make an awful mess anyway. You have been described as having all the grace of a bag of bricks, which has naturally earned you many friends in life. The people you correspond with may be employees and business partners rather than any real intimate friends, but you have a sizeable company under your thumb, and a net worth that’s growing every day.

     You will be twenty-three when you become much more than just the boss’ boss.

     When you were nineteen, your managers kept you in a back office where the typists and the secretarial women could neither see you nor resent you for getting hired in the first place. When you ventured out for the rare cup of coffee or to run something to another office, the occasional man in a suit would ask you bring them a mug or to empty their trash can. You never really knew how to deal with that. Mostly, you found that giving them a complacent ‘I’ll be right back, sir,’ and returning to your office through the back stairwell did the trick. Your office grew piles of blueprints, wobbling stacks that could rival the tower of Babel. Sometimes you would sleep in the office overnight and be awoken by the sounds of the cleaning lady.

     It won’t be long until you realize just how many responsibilities people will stack on you when they realize you do a half-competent job. Nothing you produce for them is news to you –  these were the devices you grew up with, that you took for granted, and it feels like plagiarism – but to your boss and your boss’ boss and  _ his  _ boss’ boss, it’s all a game changer. 

     But before you turn twenty, the economy will collapse, along with all your hard work. The world will become a little dirtier, a little colder.

     You will lose your job because no profit can be made from the luxuries you present them with, the luxuries no one can afford, that will require whole new factories just to produce. Between finding a new apartment and thanking your lucky stars that you always kept your money under your mattress, you will at least be smart enough to patent everything before it falls into some fat walrus’ hands. These will be your foundation. You will tug yourself up by the bootstraps. You will kick and bite and scratch your way back up to top. You will have come much too far to give up now.

     The storm will settle, just as it always does. Your first venture will be a company you called Prometheus, a manufacturer of Edison’s nickel-iron batteries. A little something called the New Deal will be introduced. Riding high on the wave of reform, you return to your old job and buy out the Bell Telephone Laboratories. With your patents, Bell Labs – now Prometheus Labs – begins producing the telephones you tore apart like puzzles as a child. The prototype will hang in your office wherever you move, city to city. It’s screen will be a little primitive, but it’s better than a dinky rotary wheel. 

     Western Electric will try to horn in. You will return the favor by buying Western Electric. 

     Under new management, WECo pushes legislation that will cause generation plants to crop up like dandelions. You slap your name onto the English Dam hydroelectric plant in New York. Before your next birthday, you will cause many a high-heeled stampede through the nation’s department stores by churning out AC units and microwaves, which you call your “electric servants.” 

     When you are twenty-one you will catch word of how all the new grocery stores are using refrigeration. This will be as shocking to you as if someone told you people had started using water to bathe. There will be a company called Kinetic Chemicals that produces what they call Freon, the stuff that makes things freeze. So you will buy Kinetic Chemicals.

     And then of course there is the issue of the patents. Postum Cereals will have already bought old Charles Birdseye’s freezer blueprints, so while you’re still popping champagne bottles from the Kinetic deal, you will swipe up Postum with the other hand. 

     One half of your infant empire is bringing light and innovation to the dirty world. The other half is making Jell-O and Maxwell House. You will truly be living the best of both worlds.

     So now the year is 1933 and you will be twenty-three, and you will be a boss with a thousand bosses underneath you.

  
  
  


     You will be in Cincinnati, high up in a gilded downtown hotel for a meeting with the blustering men of Procter & Gamble. They want to buy Postum out from under you – you want to give them the WECo treatment and buy them back. The evening, by this point, will be tense.

     Through the wide Art Deco windows you can see over the Ohio to the dark shore of Kentucky, though you’ll be paying more attention to your reflection in the glass. The Hepburn slacks were a bold move, you think as you sip your tea. The man they’ve sent to suck up to you drones on, still believing that you’re listening to him.

     From nowhere will come a woman in red, a sharp blazer and matching skirt that make her look like she’s constructed from triangles. It’s a pigment that turns your stomach, a hex code recipe for nausea. You don’t have to look at her lapel to know that that stupid little spoon is sparkling there.

     “Enjoying your evening?” she cuts in. You give her a quick up-and-down, taking in her loose brown curls, her sharp red smile made of forty-five degree angles. She cocks her head in that twitching way that the second hand on a clock moves.

     You turn your back on the twenty-something fresh-faced intern they’ve got snuffling at your heels. 

     “Does my face suggest otherwise?” you will demure, giving her an eyes-half-closed look that you’ve mastered, the one that makes the schmucks and the clowns melt between your fingers.  
     The woman puts her hands behind her back. “Dr. English–”  
     “ _ –Miss _ ,” you correct. “Earning a PhD has taken a backseat to the way business is running currently.”  
     “Allow me, then,  _ Miss  _ English, to offer you an opportunity to focus on your studies.” The woman extends her hand. “We’d like to speak with you regarding your acquisition of Kinetic Chemicals.”

     A man in a tie offers you shrimp on a platter. You wave him away without looking at him, instead pawning your empty tea cup off on him. You do not shake this woman’s hand.

     “Just for the sake of transparency, who is ‘we?’” you will ask with a tight-lipped smile.  
     The woman’s mouth twitches downward, for the barest fraction of a second. Like hearing the slight shift in tone within the droning of electrical lights. “Betty Crocker, of course.”  
     “Oh, of  _ course _ , silly me.”

     The woman still has her hand extended. She glances at it and puts it behind her when you make a show of putting your hands in your pockets.

     “If you have the time, I’d love to discuss the possibilities between our two corporations. Betty Crocker is prepared to make a generous offer on both Kinetic  _ and  _ Prometheus Labs.” Her eyes will narrow to slits as her smile grows. “You see, we’ve had our eyes on that industry for quite a while. A bit of a blow when you scooped it out from under us, I’m afraid. It would be a classic win-win.”  
     You look at her down the bridge of your nose. “She who hesitates starves. And anyway, the last I heard, Betty is doing  _ quite  _ well for herself.”  
     The woman preens at this comment. “We’ve had a successful fiscal year, yes.” You pray that she won’t mention it aloud, but she continues anyway with, “The acquisition of DuPont has bolstered our influence quite a bit.”

     Stupid Stepmother and her dumb money, taking all the stuff you had your mind set on. You will be thankful, however, that the woman does not mention your current territorial spat over who will absorb Delco Electronics.

 

     You only give her a strained smile, so the woman blathers on. “If we could sit down and have a talk, lady to lady, I’d love nothing more than to crunch the numbers with you.”

     Her voice, her face, her movements – it’s all eerie and wrong. Something plastic and artificial about her. An automaton with a pre-programmed script. 

     “If I may – what exactly is your business here tonight? Why not wait until I’ve returned to headquarters?”  
     “You’re a very busy woman, Miss English. We knew we couldn’t miss the opportunity when we heard you were in the Queen City.” She tilts her head, her brown curls bouncing, and there it is, that gleam in her eye as she says what you’ve been fearing from the moment you laid eyes on her – “And after all, I’m here to discuss business with these men, too. Betty Crocker is hoping to buy out P&G by the end of the quarter.”

     How you hope that this harpy doesn’t notice the muscle straining in your jaw.

     “In regards to my previous acquisitions – I apologize, but I have no intent on selling what’s mine. It feels a little perverse to pass around subsidiaries like dirty laundry.” You rock back and forth on your heels, tossing your hair. It will have grown past your shoulders by now, and you’ve tied it up with a bright green scarf.      “So the answer is ‘no.’ You can tell Betty that Miss English beat her to it.”

     You scarcely notice the woman disappear, nor the words she parts with, nor the look on her face, because you will already be planning the phone calls you’ll make when you are back in your hotel suite. A ten-man security team should do it, on you at all times, ever vigilant for that bloody Crocker Red. You will not grate your way through another situation like this. You will not let them breathe their sugarsweet stench on you. You will not deign to stand before them and pretend that you don’t want to scratch their eyes out. 

 

     When the woman in red has vanished, you bustle down the marble floor with your kitten heels clicking, cutting through the black wave of old men. They part for you, a Nile of toupees and ill-tailored suits.

     “Mr. Deupree.” You address the man in the center of them all, with sagging jowls and a set of eyebrows like fat caterpillars. “Let’s get down to the nuts and bolts. You already know what my answer is going to be, and you already know you won’t like it. Now it’s time for you to consider my offer.”

     The company president is taken off guard. Though you don’t look around you to take in the expressions of the men around you –  faces you’ve seen before, incredulity and disdain and contempt – you can hear them snickering to each other.

     “Miss English,” Deupree bumbles, “you really don’t beat around the bush, do you?”

     “No. I don’t.” You will give him your eyes-half-closed smile. “Talk to me when you’re ready to crunch numbers.”


	12. 1935

     You will be twenty-five when the empire you’ve built gets its name.

 

     When you were sixteen and you met the devil face to face, it called you the little witch. One of two, the one with the ‘boy,’ the boy you thought had to be John. You were the witch with the boy, the thing that Skaia dragged in. The demon named English stays in the back of your head, walks in your shadow, and lives in your head. You think about its words often.

     Well, if Skaia is responsible for you, whatever it is, then it must be something good. You like the sound of it, how it rolls off the tongue, the shimmer of fantasy that hides behind it. It sounds familiar and safe, cumulus blue and bright yellow. If you are Skaia’s witch, then so be it. Let Skaia take credit where credit is due. 

     In 1935, Prometheus and its children will all be christened Skaianet. It goes up on billboards, plastered across store fronts, stamped on shipping containers and semi trucks. But you will still be far, far behind your stepmother.

     A long time ago, the Baroness sometimes told you that you lacked drive, lacked initiative. She said you were unmotivated and sullen, that your ennui and your apathy would lead you to misery, and _ look me in the eye angelfish, don’t you wish for anyfin more from your sad little life _ ? So when you are twenty-five, you will decide to show some initiative and rob your stepmother’s house.   
  
  


     “But of course I remember you, Miss Crocker,” chirps the servant as he perches in your laboratory. He adjusts his cufflinks, unperturbed by the wires and screens that beep and whir. “She considered wiping our memory banks regarding your existence, but in the end I suppose she wished to make an example. That way, if you came back, we could deal with your presence accordingly.”

     You sit across from him, perched on your table with your ankles crossed. The servant is being an awfully good sport about all of this. If two strange men had come into your home, knocked you out, and carried you cross-country in a burlap sack, you can’t say you would have been in very good spirits.

     “Actually, it’s Dr. English now,” you correct through a thin smile. “And what would you like to be called?”  
     The servant cocks his head. “I have no name. I could give you my serial number.”  
     “We were callin’ ‘im ‘Texas’ on the way here,” Jackson pipes up from the doorway. 

     He and Ragweed still haven’t changed out of their jumpsuits, the county inspector uniforms that they used to weasel their way into the Crocker estate. Checking electrical lines around the house, they said. It was an insane idea, terribly ill-conceived, and you were certain it would kill them. When did they ever care about danger, though? Your train hopping boys went anyway. They were too easy to find, and all too happy to be of service. So much time you spent drawing up floor plans, telling them where all the secret panels were, where Betty stored the idle ones. Dwelling on it gave you nightmares. You figured it was an adequate way for them to repay you for all the times you played the decoy for their petty thefts.

     The only boy you didn’t find –  or rather, didn’t want to – was Marlowe. Jackson tells you he married a girl in Chicago, that she had one kid already and was about to have his second. That, you decided, was not something with which you wanted to get involved.

     You laugh. “Texas, then.”  
     “This is acceptable,” Texas will say with a shrug. “You look quite different now, Dr. English.”  
     “I had hoped as much.” You fold your hands in your lap. “I have an awkward request to make of you, Texas. Do you remember when some of the servants gave me their scrap pieces when I was building radios?”  
     “Why, yes. I passed on plenty of worn diodes to you, I believe.”  
     “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to do that again. Not junk this time, though. I’d like to take some pieces of you, just one at a time, to analyze and make blueprints of. Everything would be returned to you.”  
     Texas blinks. “It would seem that there’s something else you’d like to say.”  
     You clear your throat. “I’d also like to weed through your memory bank.”  
     “Whatever for?”  
     “Things I’d like to check,” you’ll tell him. “I’ll leave everything in its place. I promise.”  
     “You always were very honest, even when it got you into trouble.” The robot nods. “All right, then.”

 

     Later, as you’re taking apart the plates of his bicep to expose the whirring world of chips and wires inside, Ragweed speaks up. He’s still as pimply and loud and thoughtless as ever, and you’re happy to let him watch you work as long as he doesn’t touch anything.

     “Jade,” he says in that pained, too-loud whisper of his, “ask him that question.”  
     “Another time,” you snip through your mask. “We’re busy.”  
     “It’s no trouble at all, Dr. English,” Texas says. “It isn’t as though I feel pain. Ask me anything you wish.”  
     “Pretty cooperative for a captive,” Jackson mumbles. He’ll be touchy now because you won’t let him eat in the laboratory. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands.   
     “There is no protocol in my code for a situation such as this,” Texas explains. “I lack even a rudimentary self-destruct function. So I believe I will make the best of my lot. After all, I could be in much worse company.”

     He gives you his imitation of a smile, rubbery and unconvincing. You will return him an affection look, just examining his eyes with the thin red LED lights tracing their irises. The scent on him is almost gone, smothered by burlap and gasoline and exhaust fumes. Still, though, you will be convinced that you can smell the stink of sugar and frosting on his suit. You will remember the servant that bound your broken wrist in plaster and wonder if it was him. You pull down your mask and set aside your tools.

     “Is John still there?” is all you will ask. You could ask so much more, the questions want to come bursting out all at once, but they burn in your throat. It feels like choking.  
     Texas merely shakes his head. “No, Dr. English. Master Crocker left the estate some years ago.”

     Your heart jumps. John Crocker, out on his own. He’d be twenty-one now.

     “Did she know about it?” you press.  
     “Naturally. The Baroness had a going away party for him. The house was teeming with her business partners. It was a lovely affair. She shed tears at the toasting.”

     There were  _ people  _ in the house. Without you to ruin everyone’s good time, your stepmother brought around actual  _ people _ .

     “Where did she send him?”  
     “Master Crocker attends university as agreed upon with the Baroness. From time to time he returns between classes. She is currently preparing for his graduation.”

     Nine years you’ve been gone, and his life seems better than ever. He’s adjusted. He’s well behaved. The sea hag has even allowed him to wander from home, to get a real education and come back whenever he wishes. He isn’t a prisoner at all. Nine years, and John is doing fine without you. He might not even remember your face. Why would he have a reason to? 

     For a moment you will only be able to lean back in your chair with your hands over your eyes, letting the pent-up sigh escape your chest. The latex of your gloves stinks. Then you straighten up again.

     “That’s good news,” you breathe. Convincing yourself more than those around you. “I’m glad.”  
     “You wish to pick through my memories of Master Crocker, don’t you?”  
     “Can you blame me?” you laugh, but then you remove a plate from the inside of his arm and a viscous, mustard-yellow liquid oozes out. You gasp and ring a buzzer for your lab assistant.   
     “Kit!” you call. “Get in here, would you? Code yellow!”  
     Kit comes bustling through the glass doors with goggles as big as her face, holding a fire extinguisher in her mousy hands.  
     “Where’s the fire?” she yips. When you point to Texas, she sighs as she realizes your pun and sets the extinguisher aside with a metallic thump.   
     “What is all this?” you ask Texas, wiping smears of yellow-brown off on your coat.  
     Texas blinks at you. “My blood, of course.”

  
  


     Your annexation of Texas will prove very, very helpful.

     For several weeks you will scarcely sleep at home, for there’s so much to be discovered and documented and replicated. There’s weaponry inside of him, guns that cause the muscles to seize up and convulse, needles that could tranquilize an elephant. You ask him about the cannons of hot plasma that the drones fired at you as you fled across the back lawn – he will show you a miniature, less effective version of it that comes blasting out of his wrist. 

     When you’re not reassembling his parts with a soldering gun, Texas will usually be found brewing tea for the lab technicians. 

     Before the summer is finished, you will have a contract with the U.S. military and a loose, under the table contract with an organization of Frenchmen. You travel to Nevada to watch the Army test your plasma cannons. Some of the men are too skinny to hold them upright on their shoulders. They shoot, they miss, they blow a smoking crater in the sand. Men in camouflage shake their heads and scribble things down in clipboards.

     Could you perhaps make a more automated model, asks the Army. You begin a version that affixes to the shoulder and is worn on the arm like a gauntlet. The trick will be preventing the recoil from popping ones arm out of its socket. 

     Life will be going well for Dr. Jade English. But two months later, you will experience a bit of misfortune. 

  
  


     “What do you think of this one, Texas? It’s streamlined, it’s minimal. I think it’s chic.”

     Texas leans over your drawing table to peer at your sketches. You can hear the squeaking as he polishes a piece of your glassware. 

     “It looks fearsome, Dr. English. Is it purposefully so?”  
     “Do you even need to ask?”  
     He clucks. “An impressive depiction of the Lord of Time. Will this be the final logo?”  
     You rest your chin in your hand and chew your pencil. A nice, flat emerald green will work nicely. Not too flashy, an offset to the jagged edges of the demon’s face. “I think so. I think it’s… bold. It would look nice on packaging.”

     Texas will make a noncommittal noise and whir back to the kitchen, where he’s started working on your stack of dirty dishes. 

     It’s nice to have help around the house. An ear to listen to you, a constant presence you can rely upon. Perhaps it’s the reason you spent so many nights at Skaianet. Your rowhouse is still littered with the markings of your work, though. Among paintings and statuettes are incomplete machines, half-built weapons and pieces of mechanical engineering. A prototype for your Army cannon hangs on the wall. A place for everything, and everything in its place.

     Then you will hear a rapping on the back door. 

     You stand so quickly that your barstool clatters behind you. The floodlights outside do not go off. You glance at the security monitor on the opposite wall. Nothing but darkness and shadow. 

     “Texas,” you shout, “answer the door.”

     He bumbles out of the kitchen, parting past the green drapes you hung in its doorway. Texas peers out the glass panes, and seeing nothing, opens the door. Then he takes a step and gasps his best impression of a human gasp. 

     “Dr. English,” he will start. But he will not finish. 

     Standing, you’ll cross the living room in your stocking feet and nudge him aside. And opening the back door wide, your foot will nudge the top of Jackson’s head. 

     It will take you a moment to understand what you’re looking at. 

     They’re piled one on top of each other, their arms splayed, lying face down as though tossed. Jackson’s face is pressed to the concrete, but Ragweed — Ragweed you can see in profile, his red hair wild, his eye open and staring to the distance. His mouth gapes open, still surprised by something. 

     Your boys have been dumped on your doorstep wearing their old jumpsuits, the ones you made them wear. The fabric is so dark that only the light glancing off of their wet blood tells you that something has taken a chunk out of their chests. 

     They’re dead because of you. You press your hand to your mouth to contain the scream. 

**Jade Crocker. Prepare for intervention.**

     Out of the black backyard comes the hulking red shape you recognize, all layers of metal and spikes like a giant beetle. The way it descends from midair, how the flames from the bottom of its feet scorch the grass — if you were not utterly terrified, you might laugh. 

     The drone lifts its arm and aims at you. 

     “Get down!” you scream, pulling Texas down with you. You hit the floorboards hard. 

     The drone’s cannon hits the wall behind you so forcefully that the windows shatter. A splintered hole gapes in your front door, the one you had taken the trouble to paint light blue. The son of a bitch. 

     “Hide,” you hiss at your servant. Then you scramble to your hands and knees and leap behind the couch, staying low as you hear the sound of the drone recharging. The sound you’ve been hearing an awful lot lately since you decided to copy it.

**Jade Crocker. Halt.**

     The next blast takes out the middle of the couch. Feather stuffing explodes everywhere, coating the room like snow. You throw yourself to the wall behind your drawing desk, where your sketch of the demon named English is staring at you from the floor. 

     “If you’re going to come for my head, at least get my name right!” you’ll yell. You jump up and snatch the prototype cannon off the wall, slipping your arm inside of it and aiming your open palm at the drone. “You wanna break my shit? I can break her shit, too!”

**Jade Crocker, p—**

     Its voice cuts out when you shoot its head clean off. 

     Blips of static electricity crackle about its neck, something like circuitry and something like blood spitting out of it. The drone takes one lumbering step back, then falls forward and catches itself with one hand. It makes a burbling sound, then it falls forward atop the bodies of Jackson and Ragweed. 

     Your whole left arm hurts. You fall on your back and stare up at the ceiling. 

     “Are you in distress, Dr. English?” comes Texas’ voice.   
     “No.” You blink back tears. “I think I dislocated my shoulder.”  
     “Skaianet officials are on their way,” he chirps. “In the meantime, allow me to clean up this mess.”

     There’s the sound of broken glass clinking on hardwood as he begins to sweep. You want to burst out laughing. Mostly, you want to vomit. 

     “Tex?”  
     “Yes, Dr. English?”  
     “We removed all of your GPS tracking, didn’t we?”  
     “That’s correct.”  
     “Are you sure?”  
     He pauses. “I’ll run a system diagnostic if it would put you at ease, Dr. English.”  
     You will try to sit up, but collapse again under the pain that bubbles in your arm. “Please.”

     Fire trucks and sirens in the distance. You will just lie on the floor and stare above you, coated in white down and stinking of cannon residue. 

     You have survived your first assassination attempt. The first of many, the first of a long list. And whether they wanted to or not, two people have died on your behalf. And they won’t be the last to do so, either. 


	13. 1939

     You will be twenty-nine when you attend the New York World’s Fair with your stepmother. 

 

     Albeit not intentionally. You did everything you could to avoid her, but everywhere you turn you see Crocker Red and that stupid little spoon logo. It feels like she’s been holding your hand since you got here. For the first few days you are there, you will not feel very much like Dr. Jade English, CEO of Skaianet at all. You will just feel like Jade Crocker, lonely homeschooled girl wonder with an anger problem. 

     How sad, you’ll think. She isn’t even here in the flesh. Just representatives and underlings.   
  


     “You don’t wish to speak with the investors?” Texas asks as you lean over the railing, watching the public bumble about below. “They were asking after you at the IBM pavilion.”  
     “All IBM has is a piddly art gallery and a prehistoric calculator,” you mutter, tracing the popped white collar of your coat that shields the lower half of your face.

     It will be an unseasonably hot May for Queens. People crowd together in writhing swarms down the thoroughfares, so you stay cloistered within the Skaianet pavilion with its cool steel interior and its blessed air conditioning. You don’t want to mingle among the masses. You don’t want to shake hands and answer questions. You don’t want to be seen at all. Call it a side effect of having multiple attempts made on your life.

     “Very well, Dr. English,” Texas will sigh. He’s gotten rather good at sighing. “Though, you  _ know _ , given the expenditures Skaianet has made on security, I hardly think you have anything to worry about.”  
     “Thank you for your input.”

 

     Down below, there’s a echo of clapping and hollering from a school group touring the Communications and Business Systems Zone. Probably sixth graders, you think. A twiggy girl wearing a welding mask has nailed the bullseye with Skaianet’s Model 6 plasma pistol. She jumps up and down with glee as the target smolders a phosphorous green. A Skaianet employee in lab whites helps her out of her protective gear while a mechanical rig disposes of the target and replaces it with another. Distantly you hear the technician downstairs asking  _ who’s next _ , and a flurry of hands shoot up.

     “Dr. English, I’m a repository of every fact and feature about Skaianet anyone could wish to know. Come down with me, and you won’t even need to speak.” Texas places a hand on your shoulder, but you can scarcely feel it – the armor you wear under your clothes is made of repurposed drone exoskeleton. “Just put on a pleasant face, and  _ I’ll  _ address the public.”

     At the moment it will annoy you, but later on, when Texas is long gone along with every tiny memory he held onto, you will feel very proud of how he’s flourished in your care.

     “If it will make you happy,” you sigh.  
     “I am indifferent. But it will make your business partners happy.” Texas whirs across the steel floor to the elevator. “And that’s what you care about, isn’t it?”

  
  


     Texas, the conniving ratfink, leaves you high and dry before you can realize you’ve been tricked into socializing. You’ll be trapped in the middle of an impromptu Q&A session with a gaggle of junior high students when your lab assistant, Kit, taps you on the shoulder.

     “Dr., don’t look now, but Mr. Gifford is coming at us from two o’clock,” she whispers through her mask.

     God,  _ him _ . It irritates you just how far men will go to avoid taking the hint and pissing off. They're like the measles, except you don’t have a vaccination against them. In much the same way you can’t help but look at a trainwreck, you look towards two o’clock anyway – and here he comes, AT&T President Walter Gifford himself. 

     “English!” he booms. The sound of his voice, every overcompensating decibel, echoes high into the glass dome ceiling. His too-brisk walk paired with the swishing of his too-big dress pants gives him the appearance of a dressed-up chihuahua scuttling across the floor.

     What else can you do in front of all these children but to give him a pained smile. At the same time a parent chaperone is ushering them away, Gifford strides up to you and shakes your hand with the same vigor as if he’s shaking out the kinks in a garden hose. Though you’re wearing gloves, you can still tell how sweaty his palms are.

     “Walter,” you demure. “Enjoying the fair?”  
     “Am I?” He puffs out his chest in a way he thinks is subtle, trying to make himself as tall as you. His red bow tie is too big for his neck –  at least you think it’s red. Everything looks bright green through your goggles. “Just came from the Food Zone. They’ve got a building shaped like a bread loaf –  have you seen it?”  
     “I’m familiar with it, yes.”

     Kit hurriedly taps away on her tablet in order to appear busy. When you glance over at the screen, you’ll see that she’s just typing random strings of letters.

     “Picked up a cake the size of a kid over at the Crocker pavilion,” he continues. “Take a break and consider having a stroll through it. You can smell the frosting from a mile away.”

     You peer behind him. Gifford’s bodyguard is munching on what looks like a frosted blondie.

     “There’s still much work to be done here, unfortunately.” You’ll fold your hands in front of you. “Maintaining the pavilion feels like throwing a party, which I’ve never been very good at. I’m surprised that you’ve found the time to enjoy yourself, Walter. How are things in AT&T’s neck of the woods?”

     Blowhards like this guy are all the same. Just the smallest shade of anger flashes across his face, makes his sparse little moustache tremble, and then he’s all smiles again. His eyebrows shoot up as he clears his throat, adding another good inch to his already impressively proportioned forehead.

     “Perhaps better if a certain mad scientist hadn’t swept half my enterprise out from under me,” he laughs bitterly. Gifford straightens his cuffs in a fidgeting sort of way. “My wife keeps asking me when I’m going to get Bell Labs back from you.”  
     “You should ask her whether she’s ever heard of osmosis.”  
     He will narrow his eyes at you. “I took you for a physicist, not a biologist.”  
     Bored, you trace your coat collar. “ _ Astro _ physicist. Surely your little venture can stand on its own without Western to prop it up. I had no idea it meant so much to you.”

     Kit masks her snort of laughter as a cough.

     “It’s not so much personal to me as it is political. You know, you should try to slow that appetite of yours. I’ve gotten more than one fire lit under my ass from those antitrust goons in Washington. One wrong move and they’ll break you into pieces before you can say ‘conglomeration.’”  
     His face flickers to worry when you give him a wide, toothless smile. “I’d welcome a visit from the Justice Department. It’s been a while since Frank Murphy and I have had tea. Thanks for the warning, anyway.”   
     “Your boyfriend won’t mind you flitting about with the judges?”  
     “My what now?”  
     “You’re involved with Chaplin, aren’t you? I heard it down the grapevine.”  
     You stare at him. “And why the  _ hell  _ would I be doing that?”

     He just blinks at you. 

     Clearing your throat, you continue, “In any case, breaking up Skaianet  won’t get you Western back. Hope you can understand.”  
     “We still got the Voder out without WECo, didn’t we? I think you’d be impressed with it.”

     The Voder, from what you’ve heard, is their attempt at synthesized human speech. You’ve heard a better approximation of language from your microwave.

     “I’ll try to get around to it.” You tilt your head and curl the end of your hair around your finger. “Did you get a chance to see all of our displays? It’s a bit of a walk. I wouldn’t blame you if you passed some of it by.”

     Gifford takes this uncomfortable moment to exhale and look around him. Skaianet pavilion is a steel trap lined with glass that lets the May sun pour in at all angles. Great panels cut into hexagonal panes reflect iridescent light, and even with your tinted goggles you must shield your eyes when you look up. The vast ceiling makes the sound of running footsteps and gasps of wonder echo and reverberate. Gifford frowns as the amazed laughter of a little girl reaches your ears. Her parents are holding her up to look at a televised presidential speech. Your rows upon rows of portable televisions are stacked into the shape of the Skaianet logo, dozens of FDR’s moving in sync.

     “Your TVs are slick,” he almost spits through his teeth. “Kudos on getting it out there. Heard the Soviets were working on a model of their own. Here’s hoping theirs won’t be better.”  
     “The only people who worry about others besting them are people who don’t deserve success. When one does better than you, it’s only an invitation to improve. To push your own limits.”  
     “Tell that to Sarnoff,” he laughs. “He’s none too happy with you for all this,” Gifford says, gesturing around you. “Years of work at the RCA only to be outrun by a girl. And with better screen quality than his boxes of static, too.”  
     “David is a gasbag and a braggart,” you tell him. “And you can quote me on that.”

     You’re just talking in circles now. You resent this, this verbal prowling and posturing with people who think they’re better than you. It’s pointless and immature. You start to wonder what could possibly happen if you decided to leap upon Gifford like a jungle cat and start tearing out his hair rather than continue this lobotomy of a conversation, but then your attention is sparked by him reaching into his pocket. Your muscles tense up and you start to step back, but all he pulls out is a cigar and a box of matches.

     “Stuffy in here, isn’t it?” he asks. “Care for a smoke?”

     You exchange a blank look with Kit, who merely shrugs at you. 

     “After you.”

 

     You hardly get the chance to people-watch anymore. At one point, you spent much of your afternoons sitting on a curb or a park bench, watching the streams of people go by. Sometimes it was innocent, a way to memorize how the way people who  _ didn’t  _ grow up cloistered in a mansion walk and talk and gesticulate. Like studying for a test –  How to Assimilate into Society 101. Sometimes it was just to choose a good schmuck to pickpocket. Now, they all blend together in indistinct smears of color. Dresses and hats and parasols, dogs on leashes and children running ahead of their parents – nothing catches your eye, nothing stands out. You exhale a long stream of smoke and listen to someone speaking Japanese by a map of the park.

     Gifford pissed off after insisting you leave the pavilion with him to ‘peruse’ the fair. You told him you’d go with him only if he brought his car – too hot to walk around in your lab whites, and you aren’t willing to shed a layer and reveal the oil and grease-smudged clothes you’re wearing underneath them. You’re planning on snubbing out his expensive Cuban cigar and heading back inside once you see him coming.

     A clocktower somewhere strikes three o’clock, and out of nowhere, up the thoroughfare will trundle your white Skaianet Chevy. You recognize it by the plates as the one that drove you here this morning. The driver has his face turned away from you – you squint, but can’t recall ever seeing him before.

     “Dr. English!” a woman calls. She will climb out of the backseat and wave to you, her smile flashing under the thick goggles that obscure her eyes. “Mr. Gifford sent us to collect you. You’re headed out of the pavilion, yes?”  
     Your eyebrow twitches. “Do I know you?”  
     “Midge Brenner, ID 03400118. You had me working the Transportation Zone. That’s where we came from.”

     Now you are very, very certain you have never met this woman. There’s a dark mole beside her nose that you feel you would’ve remembered.

     “Kit, did you know about this?” you turn and murmur behind you. When no response comes, you look over your shoulder and see that Kit has left her post. Your eyes will flicker to the glass doors, to the lobby inside, but you can’t see the slight, mousy frame of her.  
     “Oh, Dr. Penn? We needed her across the park. Some nasty business with an overheated engine. Didn’t want to bother you with it.”

     Midge will hold the passenger side door open for you. The driver will still not look at you. The Chevy’s chassis will rock with the weight of something moving in either the backseat or the trunk.

     Your hand slides into lab coat, where a plasma pistol is strapped to your belt.  As you narrow your eyes at Midge and reach out to take the door handle, a high-pitched electric beeping grates on your ears. The driver turns, his eyes wide. Midge curses. You don’t have time to do anything but throw your arms in front of your face when the car bomb underneath the Chevy explodes.

     Screams and hollering. A part of the car comes flying and strikes a glass door, shattering it. You can’t hear past the whining that mutes everything else. You’re faintly aware that you’ve been thrown to the concrete, that the side of your head is throbbing and that there may or may not be a cut across your cheek. Heat rolls off of the destroyed Chevy and bathes you in the stink of gasoline.

     “Dr. English!” you hear over the distant, warbling sound of an approaching ambulance. “Dr. English, are you all right?”

     Texas lifts you up by the arms and elevates your head. You lean against him and try to speak, but there’s a searing burn in your throat that stops up your words and turns them to a pained sigh.

     “Kit,” is all you manage to sputter. “Where?”  
     Texas shakes his head. “Kit is gone, Dr. English.”

     A group of Skaianet technicians in white are already attacking the smoking skeleton of the Chevy with fire extinguishers. The hiss of the white cloud dilutes all other sound. 

     You think one of your eardrums may have burst.

     “We have to leave,” you choke as you gain balance in your feet. Soot and ash has turned you all gray. Texas helps you out of your lab coat. “I won’t stay here.”  
     “Dr. English, the fair’s close is weeks away.”  
     “Don’t care. They can handle it.”

     An ambulance pulls up. A number of men more appropriate for a clown car come leaping out the back, and you find yourself swarmed by stubble-chinned blue-eyed pretty boys. You’re still swatting them off when you find your voice and raise it to a shout.

     “We are leaving this fair, we are leaving this city, and that is the end of it!” you bark. Texas recoils when you jab a finger at him.“And if the pavilion must close before the fair is over, that’s what’s going to happen!”

     You should have never come here. Betty’s won again –  or she would’ve anyway if you had cowed, if you had shown deference and declined to show up at all. Jade Crocker, lonely homeschooled girl with an anger problem, has landed herself in hot water once again, and boy is she tired of it. She thinks she’s big and bad and righteous, she thinks she’s important with her Lincoln Log tower of treasure, but she’s no match for Mother in the end. She has no one to blame but herself. 

     John, you’ll bet, never has to deal with shit like this.


	14. 1944

     You will be thirty-four and the dream will always be the same.

 

     In the dream you are in the kitchen and your stepmother is baking. Cake pans are cooling, piping bags dribble blue frosting. You are wearing your little black Mary Janes and your flouncy Sunday dress, Crocker Red with the white petticoat underneath, and because the flour floats in dusty clouds about you, your stepmother has tied you up in her good apron. Her vast coils of black hair tickle your face when she straightens your apron straps. She pats you on the face for sitting so still. Her clammy gray skin feels like raw fish. 

     There are other children in the house, but you know neither where they are nor what they look like. You catch a glimpse of a skirt, the flash of feet running up the staircase. You hear their giggling and their whispering voices. You ask your stepmother who they are, where they come from, why they are in your house.

_      My silly guppy,  _ she says through her rows of shark teeth,  _ no one’s here but us. _

     You frost a tray of cupcakes bright blue and green. A scorpion scuttles across the countertop and disappears behind a cookbook.

     Before the egg timer even has time to go off, it is nighttime and the kitchen is full of sweets. Frogs are croaking outside the window. A white tentacle slaps against the glass and vanishes. You and your stepmother load up a towering dessert cart with the treats you’ve made. The cart rattles over the threshold when you roll it to the backyard.

     There are floodlights pouring into the dark, but you can’t see anything. A white dog is pacing back and forth on the other side of the fence. You are holding a three-tiered cake and your stepmother points to a black spot in the ground. When you approach it, you see that a shallow block of earth has been exhumed. It looks like a grave. It’s littered with plastic candy wrappers.

_      Here we are, angelfish,  _ Betty says.  _ Go on –  be a good girl. _

     You dump the cake inside. The frosting splatters against the dirt. You go on piling desserts inside until the cart is empty. A dog howls, a gun goes off. You feel clammy hands on the back of your neck.

     Then you wake up.

 

     You wake up in your office, or in the lab, or somewhere else that isn’t your bed. You wake up slumped over papers to be signed, keyboards typing rows of whatever key your elbow rests on. You will wake up with bleary eyes, glasses smudged and your back aching. You will wake up to the cold, to the dull droning of fluorescent lights. A bad taste in your mouth and the scent of cake mix on your skin.

     This summer, Betty Crocker put up a new plant across the state line, right up the corner of Vermont. The smell of flavor processing leaks over the highway and bleeds its way to Skaianet. 

     Over the past few years, you will have become what some refer to as “hard to deal with.” You prefer your papers to your peers, you keep long nocturnal hours and sleep throughout the day. Small sounds make you jump. You startle yourself awake when a water pipe hisses or a computer boots itself up. You carry a pistol on your belt. Your medicine cabinet is a menagerie of bottles for migraines, night terrors, nausea, narcolepsy, anxiety. At some point, you will have to wonder how much of this is nature and how much is nurture.

  
  


     There’s a knock on the laboratory door.

     “Dr. English?” Texas asks. He nudges the door open. “Are you well?”  
     You rub your stinging eyes. “Well as I ever am.”  
     “I wanted to bring you something.” He comes in and places a dinner tray on the black countertop, gently sweeping away the papers you’ve drooled on. “Happy birthday, Dr. English.”

     You will stare at him, mouth open, and look to the puppy calendar on the wall. A golden retriever in a bowler hat lolls its tongue out at you. Today is the first of December, and you are thirty-four.

     “I recall you never ate the Baroness’ desserts, so I determined this would be a more suitable option. I’m not fond of sweets myself, given that I have nothing comparable to a digestive system.”

     You peer under the silver lid atop the tray and see that Texas has made what was probably supposed to be a plate of osso buco. It just smells okay.

     The concept of birthdays is not one to which you ever became accustomed. Your stepmother did not celebrate them because she thought they were extravagant and ostentatious, that they happened far too often, that you turned around and it was already time for another one. You knew your date of birth, but it was no different from next Tuesday, or the weekend before last, or Labor Day. Insignificant and unnoteworthy. It feels like someone congratulating you for knowing how to breathe or for pumping blood through your veins.

     “Thank you, Tex. It looks… lovely.”  
     “I’ll give you a moment to eat. But first, I wanted to let you know that there’s a party for you in the boardroom this evening. Quite a few people have been planning it. They’re very excited; all you’d have to do is poke your head in.”

 

     Historically, good things have always been a cushion for some bit of bad news. When John was seven years old, he picked you a bouquet of wildflowers before he confessed to losing your set of jacks. In Wichita, Ragweed and Jackson bought you a milkshake right after you got off the train, only for Marlowe to tell you that you would have to hotwire a car for them.

     “You have something else to tell me, yes?” You will look at Texas’ hands, how they fiddle and twitch.  
     “There’s another birthday ‘gift’ for you, if you could call it that. The board of trustees received an offer from the Baroness this morning.  
     “I  _ am  _ the board of trustees.” Made up names and faces to beat back the antitrust lobbyists. Twenty extensions of yourself.  
     “I know that, Dr. English. And she probably knows that, too. The Baroness likes to go through the proper channels, even if they don’t mean anything.” He pauses. “They want to buy Skaianet for forty million.”  
     You burst out laughing so suddenly that it turns to a fit of coughing. “She can’t afford to do that. Not even  _ she  _ could pull that money out of thin air during a time like this. Half of the crap that goes into her products has been rationed, she  _ can’t  _ be pulling in even half that revenue.”

     You know this to be true because the same rationing has also punched Skaianet in the gut. You have not been able to produce your electric servants – your washing machines, your freezers, your AC units, your microwaves – for over a year. All of it goes towards the War.

     “I know you like to think objectively, but the Baroness is not one to be reigned by what humans believe to be rational.”

     You drum your fingers against the counter. Anger lights you up so quickly that it turns to excitement – two emotions that have always been hard to disentangle for you. Suddenly you will shoot up from your chair, pacing about the lab in circles with your hands wringing behind your back. You stop to wipe the oily smudges from your lenses. Then you laugh and tap your chin.

     “Texas,” you ask, “where did our original logo end up? The one that hung in Pittsburgh?”  
     “The one you drafted, of the Lord of Time? That logo is in horrible disrepair, Dr. English. It’s very rusted. The snow aged it poorly.”  
     “I don’t care if you can’t even make out the green. It was big, wasn’t it?”  
     “Ten feet across, I believe. You were quite enamored with it when it was installed.” Texas straightens his shirt collar. “It’s in storage in Boston now.”  
     “Ha!” You tie your hair up into a disastrous bun, then hang your lab coat on the back of your chair and sit down to eat. Texas’ osso buco is a little dry –  which you didn’t know was possible – but he’s clearly tried very hard. There’s even a little lemon garnish on the side. “Oh, not for long. I want the warehouse in Boston rung. Tell them I want that logo on a pallet tonight, and I want it sent to her door.”  
     “You mean her office in Minneapolis? Or the new one in Vermont?”  
     “No, I want it sent  _ home.  _ To Washington. I want a truck to drop it off at the gate.” You cut off a too-big chunk of veal and stuff it in your face like a squirrel.      “Don’t want some hapless delivery driver to get blown to bits.”  
     Texas blinks at you. “If you wish. I’m not sure I understand what the purpose of such a message would be, though. Shouldn’t you provide a less… obscure answer?”  
     “Oh, of course.” You set aside your silverware and wipe your wrist against your mouth. “Send a note along, too. Tell ‘em it should say ‘fuck no!’”

     Darting to the Plexiglas window that looks out into the dark hallway, you check your reflection and straighten your blouse. Texas stares at you blankly as you fluff up your hair and tuck your shirt inside your belt.

     “You seem excited, Dr. English.”  
     “I am! I’m very excited. This is just what I needed, Tex. Some pep in my step. A reason to get up and at ‘em.” You’ll flash him a bright smile. “Thanks for the dinner, Tex. It was great.”  
     “Where are you off to now?”  
     “To the boardroom, of course!” You shut off  the laboratory light and look at him over your shoulder. “I have a birthday to celebrate.”

 

     You’re halfway to the elevator before Texas can even collect your dishes. Your back still hurts, and your eyes still sting, and your migraine is still knocking around in the back of your head. But it’s your birthday, and although you don’t know it yet, rations will end soon and soldiers will come home and money will flow. A truck will leave Boston tonight en route for Washington, and your stepmother will have a rude surprise waiting for her when she wakes up to brew her morning coffee. You can see her now in her fuchsia bathrobe, looking out the window over the vast yard to see her servants struggling with a massive package. When she strides across the grass in her slippers and demands to see what eyesore they’ve brought into her home, she will open the box and see the face of the demon named English. 

     You can see her shock, how it will give in to fury, how it will turn to breaking plates and shattering glass, and that’s the greatest gift of all you could imagine. Happy birthday to you.


	15. 1948

     You will be thirty-eight when Skaianet gets into the transportation game.

 

     When their husbands and their fathers and their brothers come home, thousands of women will be thrown out of the warehouses, the factories, the hangars and the ports. And when the men swoop in and steal their jobs, Skaianet will hire them back. By 1946 you will have nine thousand women working for you to assemble passenger planes, private jets, steam locomotives outfitted with computers and GPS and every trapping and luxury you can squeeze into them. These machines you will sell to other companies, but you partner with the government to help expand passenger railways into the west. 

     Betty Crocker began investing in the automotive industry one year prior. You are very, very interested to see which mode of transportation will trump the other.

     In Salt Lake City, the seat of your Western headquarters, you will be overseeing the construction of rail through Utah into Nevada. 

     You don’t like the air out here. It’s dry and it’s hot and it makes your skin itch. You will think of all the times you slept in dusty rail cars, how you napped in two-hour intervals under the desert sky while one of your boys watched over you. You don’t know how you were able to bear it. So you stay in your top-floor office, where the floors are cool and the AC is blowing and the glass windows look comfortably over the city without your ever needing to leave.

     One afternoon there is a lull between one meeting and the next. You will prop your feet up on your desk and flip idly between TV channels, blinking in boredom as secretaries outside hustle and bustle and shout at one another and clack away on typewriters. You aren’t sure what the commercial is advertising until a man sloppily grabs a slice of cake and shoves it into his mouth, leaving a smear of chocolate icing on his cheek. You will find yourself sneering.

     “...  _ but remember that not all cake mixes are the same. Betty Crocker cake mixes are different! They call for your eggs, added by you at home. It’s the only national cake mix brand that lets you add the eggs.” _

     The bar is barely off the ground, you suppose. You cross your arms and watch a woman in a frilly apron crack an egg on the side of her mixing bowl, uncomfortably big on the flat screen television that dominates your wall. Though the commercial doesn’t play the sound it makes, the crisp cracking and the sloshing as the yolk spills out, you still remember how your stepmother loved this part. How it made the egg seem like it was still alive, that she was scooping the life out of it. No wonder she wants the American housewife to experience such a simple pleasure.

     “ _ Nine out of ten homemakers in recent tests said that Betty Crocker cake mixes gave them thicker, taller cakes than the dried egg mixes they tested. Yes, and better-tasting cakes, too! Try Betty Crocker Party Cake mix for yellow, white, or spice cake, and try Betty Crocker’s devil’s food cake mix for rich, moist devil’s food. And for the full Betty Crocker experience, stop by your local Kroger Food and Drug Mart to sample her top of the line countertop blender, or the non-stick cooking spray  _ Homemaker Magazine  _ calls ‘Number One Kitchen Essential of the Year!’ _ ”

     Betty Crocker owns all those magazines. You’ll sniff and pick up the remote because you know you only watch these things to make yourself angry, and anger is something you’re trying to dial back on. The bit about cooking spray stings, though. Procter & Gamble, at one point, would’ve had their logo on the back of that thing. Before Betty wrangled it. You suck your teeth and change the channel.

     A flurry of applause and cheering. An NBC title screen fades from view before you can read it. A warbling siren will play as a theater stage appears, along with “TEXACO STAR THEATER” in bold print. You think you may have heard of this show before. A woman in the marketing department kept trying to get you to watch it. You yawn as men dressed as gas station attendants introduce the host, a Milton Berle who comes on stage dressed as a clown. Women hoot and holler as he carries on a lengthy address, stopping multiple times to adjust his suspenders and pick up his bulbous red nose when it falls off.

     “And anywho – yes, I heard ya ma’am, I’ll see  _ you  _ later –  I wanna introduce a man who was gracious and insane enough to host our show tonight. No kidding, I –” he laughs, “I think they brought him here in a van from the loony bin, I said, I said to ‘im, ‘you wanted to come here?’ He says ‘yes,’ I say ‘they tell you it was fifteen thousand a week, ‘cause that’s what they told me and I’m still holding out for it!’ Aw, folks, I shouldn’t joke when my zoo handler is right behind the curtain. Oh, without further ado, sweet as can be – and a little moist from what I hear – with the name to match, I’d like you to give him a big Texaco welcome, here’s John Crocker everybody!”

     When the curtain opens and you see your brother walk out onto the stage, you are so shocked that you don’t say anything. You don’t even move. You just sit and stare at him with your mouth gaping open.

     “Hello there everybody, thank you, thank you,” John laughs as he waits for the applause to die down. Your brother sticks his hands in his pockets and walks across the stage with bashful hesitation. He keeps his head half-bowed as he beams at the camera. “When they asked me to host the Star Theater I decided to sit down and watch an episode proper, and uh,” he laughs, “I phoned my agent and I said ‘tell ‘em if they mention a wig I’m outta there.’ I had uh, a call from NBC last week, they said, ‘you comfortable wearing a costume?’ I said, ‘what’d you have in mind?’ They said, ‘you ever heard of Emmett Kelly?’”

     He can scarcely get a sentence out without getting interrupted. Shut up, you’ll think, shut up, some people are trying to hear!

     “And I thought on it for a bit and I said, ‘y’know, I got my own costume at home,’ and folks, you’re lookin’ at it.” He pauses for laughter as he kicks the air in his trousers, which you notice now are a little too big. John straightens his bowtie. You wish you could tell whether it was red or not. 

     “Anyway, anyway. Thanks for the uh –  the colorful descriptor there, Milton. Love to start the evening off feeling defensive,” he laughs. “First time for everything folks, and I’ve never been described on live TV as ‘moist.’” The audience titters. “‘Sweet,’ though, I can get behind sweet. I was called sweet a lot as a kid. Any of you men out there been called –  fellas, I’m tellin’ ya, you probably can’t tell by looking at me, but I was not… I was not a tough boy.”

     He stops and chuckles, looking out over the audience. You pull yourself out of your chair and stand as close as the screen as you can without pressing your nose to it, just looking at him in the quick and ever-changing camera angles. John is tall now –  at least you think so, you’re not sure how big the stage is. But his face is still the face of your baby brother, like it’s been copy and pasted onto an adult body. He still wears glasses, and you think they suit the square shape of his jaw, but the frames are a little thick for your own preference. You won’t be sure whether it’s just the poor camera quality, but it looks like he still has the constellation of dark moles speckled about his face. John nervously drags his hand down his chin as he gives his audience a wide smile. All teeth and gums, like when he beat you in a card game or tricked you into sitting on a whoopee cushion.

     “No, I was not a tough boy… not at all. My mother used to –  did this ever happen to you? Did you – she used to make us do things that she called ‘character development.’ You ever heard of this?”

     Us. He said  _ us.  _

     “My older sister and I, we uh, you know when you see a kid comin’ down the block from the Catholic school and he’s got his little kneesocks on and you’re a scrappy thirteen-year-old with somethin’ to prove, so you think ‘yeah, I could take this kid?’” A flurry of surprised laughter from the women. “I was not the thirteen-year-old in this scenario. No, I was… I had the tensile strength of tissue paper, folks. We… okay, I still do. Anywho,” John stops to laugh at his own joke. “My sister and I, um, well  _ she  _ could fight, I was just there to look pretty. I was the pretty girl you see outside the boxing ring, holding the signs up for the crowd. I was… yes, God gave me a few gifts, but strength and speed and, well, anything to do with physical skill, He did not bestow any of that on me. He said ‘that’s enough for one kid’ and went on to the next one. We might’ve been switched up there, I think the Big Man took a look at the two of us and just got confused. Guests come over and the women pinch my cheek like ‘oh, and what a sweet little girl you have,’ and I say ‘yes Marjorie, it’s the Hair Slik… it gives me… it gives me that soft and glossy shine.’ I – I cannot stress this enough. So my mother liked to toughen us up with what she called ‘character development.’”

 

     Here are some things that, by this point, you will know about John by flipping through and decoding the memory banks Texas handed over to you. You know that he went to Whitman College after attending a few scattered semesters of public school. You know that he is whip-smart in English classes but has trouble committing himself to study, so whenever his grades began to slip, Betty would simply make a donation to the college. You know he started an improv club and had many roommates, but never spoke of them at home. You know John was drafted for the war, but his terrible eyesight and mild asthma ruled him out for service. You know that he took up drawing, but is awfully embarrassed at what he perceives as lack of skill and hides them away when he finishes them. You know that yellow cake stopped being his favorite, that he loves spice cake the best now, and that Betty let him bake for her on special occasions. You know his wastebasket would fill with the crumpled up drafts of comedy bits, that he started to think magic tricks were for babies. You know your old bedroom has a record player in it now, and when John was home from school he would listen to comedy albums and scribble down notes in the couch that replaced your bed. You also know that John never saw your stepmother’s real face.

     You know so much about your brother, and you don’t even know if he realizes that Jade English is you. But still, even now, the two of you are ‘us.’ You are ‘my older sister and I.’

 

     “So you’ve heard of this, yes? All right, one morning we get up before dawn, and she’s waiting for us outside. Mother says –  and this is absolutely true – ‘you aren’t going to get calluses playing card tricks.’” He stops to smile and raise his eyebrows at the audience. “At this point, you know, I’m at that age where you generally know what you’re about. And I know my hands are uh, more like a garnish for my arms than any uh, actual tool. This is true today. So you can imagine my distress at the idea of having… calluses. Is this a universal experience? I never knew what was such a big deal about having these things. I… really folks, I look at my mother and I say, ‘Ma, I’ve got precious few things goin’ for me. I’m –  I’m eight years old, Ma, I gotta… I gotta tell ya, baby soft hands are pretty much my defining characteristic.”

     You remember this day. How could you not? The cuts and the burns healed well enough, but you still have two deep grooves in the web of your left thumb where the nettles sliced into your skin, where your stepmother grabbed your wrist and forced it into the thorns. As you stand transfixed, watching your brother charm all these strangers, you hold your left hand to your chest and trace the scars with your thumb.

     “Mothers always think a little labor will set you straight, don’t they. A little sun, a little sweat… well she says we’re gonna be pulling weeds. That’s boring work, innit? Folks talk a lot about watching grass grow – buddy, try weeding it. And Ma’s tryin’ to make sure we’re putting our backs in it, y’know, be real grateful for having such uh, an attentive mother….” He stops to laugh at himself again. He gesticulates a lot, you notice. He swings his hands about as he speaks. “And it’s just boring as beans, okay? At some point you just have to put your faith in the Lord and hope we don’t hop the fence. She’ll be calling us for dinner and we’re gonna be three acres out learning how to set a broken nose, right? So… she goes inside and we’re uh, left to our own devices. Horrible term… the first person to be left ‘to his own devices’ is no one I wanna be stuck in a room with.”

     Suddenly, you let out a peal of surprised laughter. You’ll press your hand to your mouth and peer out the window to the lobby outside, like you’re being caught in the middle of doing something bad. You bite your index finger to stop yourself making a sound.

     “So Ma goes inside to uh, do whatever your mom did when you weren’t around. I don’t know, clip her toenails? Peel her face off? I clearly–” he laughs, “I clearly know a lot about women. I’ll be here all night ladies, give me a call sometime.” Someone in the audience whistles, and he points at her and winks. “So, where was I? Right, my older sister and I – imagine you’ve trapped a squirrel and you’re setting it loose in some other schmuck’s yard – yeah, uh, it was kind of like that. Ma goes inside and we, you know, eight-year-olds might just be the driving creative minds behind this great nation of ours. I say that because, as soon as the back door closed, I turn to my sister and I say, you know, we could get this done a lot faster with something like, I don’t know, like a hoe or a sickle. You know, anything but the shears that were manufactured for this exact purpose. This is a great idea to me. I feel on top of the world. So she covers for me while I go to the shed and get uh, my tools of the trade, and I decide I’m going to use this little hand rake to uh, just dig ‘em on out. Roots and all just… just really cut out the middleman here.

     “Folks I….” he’ll stop to laugh as he puts his hands on his hips. “I’m standing like this, you know? I’m gripping my little rake like this….” John gets in the position of a runner about to start a marathon. The audience laughs, a woman groans. “And I’m ready to go to town. I push down in the dirt and I, it’s October in Washington, okay? The ground is not soft. We’re not – this is not – no one’s planting daisies in this dirt, okay? So I push hard and the dirt is rock solid and I, I just plummet face first into the nettles.”

     He’ll look so pleased with himself as the audience bursts into shocked cackling. You remember this very well, how he squalled once he realized what he’d done, all the tiny thorns you had to pluck out of his hair with your bare hands. You felt nauseous the whole time. But now –  what is it about John that will make this sound so funny? How could he manage to make this ordeal sound anything other than horrible? You want to laugh, but you also want to make a sound like a wounded animal, so you press your hand tight to your mouth.

     “For the ladies in the audience who are, who are older sisters yourselves, you can probably imagine with pinpoint accuracy the face that my sister is giving me. And I’m hollering the whole while, I’m, I’m thrashing about and it’s just getting more nettles stuck in me. So she hauls me out and I’m sniffling – I told you I was not a tough boy, I had, I… folks, I had a delicate constitution – and you know how your older siblings are perfectly willing to just, just whale on you, but if someone else does it suddenly it’s a national emergency? She’s bigger and smart than me but she’s still twelve years old, and I believe girls of this age are wells of uh, primordial chaotic energy. So she does me one better and she says, ‘well Johnny, we’re gonna burn this mother to the ground.’

“She has a lighter in her pocket and, I don’t… some things you just accept. You don’t question it. And I think yeah, this is a bulletproof plan, no way this will go wrong at all. You know, like the plan that crashed and burned about a minute prior? So uh, I don’t know if anyone knows this, but weeds are… they’re really quite flammable. I think once the grass started smoking and we had built ourselves a little, uh, a miniature pyre did we realize that maybe this was not a great idea. So I look at my sister and I say, uh, how’re we puttin’ this thing out? I still see how her face turned, from,” he laughs, “from utterly neutral to this blank look of realization. From realization, to horror.”

     You can’t help it. You’ll start to laugh, and you’ll be so happy that he remembers you, that he hasn’t boxed you away in a corner of his mind with his old magic tricks and his books. You laugh because he’s so funny now, and so grown up, and you’re so happy that he’s doing so well and that all of these people love him and that he did what you couldn't. Your baby-not-brother, the little boy you thought you were responsible for – he survived Betty all on his own, he didn’t need your protection, and he didn’t have to run away. He’s much stronger than you could ever hope to be. And damn it, how is he this funny?

     You laugh so hard that you will begin to cry.

     “So we’re taking our aprons off and trying to, you know, smother the flame, and one of the housekeepers, he sees what we’re trying to do and he–”

     His act is interrupted by a sound that you will think must be the loud banging of a musical instrument, but then a wave of gasps and screams comes up from the audience, and you’re surprised when something in front of the stage crackles and explodes. A few stage lights burst, showering the stage with glass and sparks. John hits the deck, scrambles backward on his hands and feet. You shriek, then squeeze your hands so tightly together that the knuckles go pale. John stands and catches a part of the curtain track before it can fall on his head. A man in a suit leaps on stage and lunges at him, and John beats him back with the metal rod. You see the top of a cameraman’s head pass by at the bottom of the screen as crew members run in different directions. The man in the suit falls, dropping a gun that goes off and causes a fresh peal of screaming. Someone drags the man away.

     “Whoa!” You can barely hear John over the din on set. “Milton didn’t tell me I’d be doing acrobatics.” The camera wobbles. “Leave it to Texaco to keep you on your toes, huh? Good one, fellas!”

     You can’t tell if he really doesn’t know what’s happening, or if he’s just trying to keep the calm. Historically, you guess both options are equally plausible. John is still giving the audience a faltering smile when the camera cuts off and a screen that says “WE’LL BE BACK IN A MOMENT” pops up in its place.

 

     John Crocker has just fought off an assassination attempt on camera. You stand in front of the screen, gaping stupidly, just listening to the piercing electric drone of the audio on screen.

     The two of you aren’t so different after all. You will not be sure whether or not you should be relieved.


	16. 1958

     You will be forty-eight when President Eisenhower gives you a tour of Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

 

     In a matter of months, America will launch its National Aeronautics and Space Administration. There’s a war to be won, and spaceships to be launched. You can appreciate a good old fashioned “good vs. evil” competition on account of your entire life, well, being one. But there’s always a tradeoff. When you’re invited to Virginia to tour what will house one of the infant NASA’s main facilities, of course it’s because they want Skaianet’s sloppy seconds.

     “To be frank with you, Dr., I think fifty engineers is a modest request. It wouldn’t be hard for me to, I don’t know, throw in a line about patriotic duty–”  
     “And if I’m hesitant I must be a Red, yes, of course.” You wave him off and slow your pace to put distance between the two of you. 

     Men are taking apart the massive pieces of a wind tunnel that will be trucked to another part of the facility. There’s the beeping of forklifts in reverse gear, the clatter as someone drops a pallet on the hard, smooth concrete. An ascending aircraft roars overhead.

     “Given your reputation as a patron of the sciences, I’d assumed you’d be more willing to lend a hand.” Eisenhower pauses, perhaps trying to keep up with your long strides. “We appreciate what you did with the DoT, Dr.”  
     “Yes, the rails no one will use.” You’ll suck your teeth, stretch your hands in an agitated sort of way. “Many thanks for allowing that to happen, Mr. President. The investment was well worth it.”  
     “Don’t go blaming the automotive industry now, Dr. English. It isn’t very progressive of you to turn your nose up at change.” He clears his throat. “And it isn’t their fault, anyway. If the rails didn’t want Americans to turn to the automobile, then they wouldn’t have let the quality of their services decline. When you want to compete, you have to be competitive. They didn’t make themselves stay viable – that’s why they were overtaken.”  
     “Competitive,” you snort. “I know a thing or two about that.”

     You will stare up at the glass ceiling as the roar of an airplane engine overpowers the facility. It comes in through the open docks and bounces around every corner and surface of the space. A man in a white hard hat yells over the din to a trio of his employees. You watch him point and gesticulate.

     “Okay, let’s be competitive.” 

     You will whirl and face him. Eisenhower takes stock of you, raising his eyebrows. He gives off that vibe that so many people do, the vibe of someone who is uncomfortable around you, who wants you to give them what they want and then get lost. The Secret Service men who trail you at a distance watch you through black sunglasses. One of them dips his head to murmur into a wire. You might be intimidated if the president didn’t have a head equal in size and shininess to a bowling ball.

     “Forget fifty – I’ll give you seventy Skaianet engineers. You can pick the department.”  
     “If?”  
     “If you let me vote.”

     There’s a brief moment during which you simply stare at each other. Eisenhower clicks his tongue and tilts his head, prompting you to say something else. But you just beam at him.

     “I thought you were Syrian,” he will finally say.

     By this time you will have cultivated a bit of a reputation for blurting out whatever comes to mind. Along with being “hard to deal with” and a number of other traits that you do not care to repeat because you feel they are rather unfair and obtuse, your reputation is not the best it’s ever been. At one point you were a “maverick,” you were “breaking ground” and “setting standards.” Well, you still are. You still do. People, though, don’t really care how smart you are or how inventive or how brave or how hardworking when you also have a habit of being sharp of tongue. People don’t like it when you stick up for yourself. People don’t like it when you have thoughts. You once had a woman in Public Relations who suggested naming one of your regional managers – a balding, wispy-haired man in suspenders – Skaianet president. Just for show. Just to give the investor a familiar face. It didn’t matter that  _ you  _ were the one with five PhDs. She didn’t last long in PR. 

     Your stepmother once told you that men don’t like it when little girls make them feel dumb. But you won’t say that she was right. So you don’t.

     “Number-crunching can wait, Dr. I’m less concerned about the  _ number  _ of scientists we recruit than what they can help us accomplish. Be frank with me –  do you think we could get another Sputnik up there?”

     Of course you could beat the Russians –  Khrushchev does not have a Jade English. Keeping old men on their toes, though, is too much fun.

     “Would it be unpatriotic if I said no?” 

     The president stares at you.

     “Just kidding.”

 

     In eleven years, when you are fifty-nine and taking pills for arthritis, American men will walk on the moon. In eleven years and two months, Skaianet will have a ten satellites circling the Earth, satellites for phone companies and satellites for GPS. In eleven years and five months you will help NASA send robots to Mars, pick up your second Nobel Peace Prize, write your seventh book, and flirt with the idea of braiding your hair again. First, though, when you are forty-eight and the year is 1958, you will strike a deal with the thirty-fourth president.

     “Do we have a deal or not, Dr. English?”  
     You extend your hand. “We have a deal. Fifty engineers and a man on the moon.”

     Eisenhower shakes your hand and is surprised when something comes away in his palm. It’s a little device, black with pincers like an earwig. A tiny green light flashes on its side. He turns the thing over and squints at it.

     “What am I looking at here?”  
     “What you’re looking at interferes with video recording. Still working on a name for it.” You put your hands in your pockets. “Basically, it scrambles CCD circuits. Makes video unusable. Soon she’ll have brothers that do the same thing with audio.”

     These little scramble-bugs roost in every building that Skaianet owns or works in. After it became evident that the Crocker factory in Vermont was bugging your plant in New York, you set them loose anywhere a secret could be whispered, where something might turn up on camera. They live in walls and attach themselves to wiring. Your secret-keepers, you call them. You’re very fond of them.

     “This is… what, a gift?”  
     You shrug. “Sure, you could call it that. Just to mark the occasion. Try to be noble about how you use it, okay?”

     He slips it into his pocket and shakes his head, like he’s surprised this conversation managed to go so well. 

     “Well, Dr., I suppose it’s time for us to crunch some numbers.”  
     You adjust your goggles. “Yes, Mr. President I suppose it is.

 

     On your way out of the hangar, back to the long black car you came here in, Eisenhower will ask you if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. You will light a cigarette and blow a ring of smoke at the car seat in front of you.

     “No use belonging to a party if I can’t vote for a candidate.”  
     “If you had the freedom, then.”  
     You exhale. “Mr. President, I’m a woman in the science field who opened up a women’s school of mathematics last year. A tenth of our profits in the last quarter went to organizations for the homeless.  _ You  _ tell  _ me  _ what party I belong to.”  
     “I don’t recall Skaianet ever contributing to the Truman campaign. Or any Democrat before him, for that matter.”  
     You puff on your cigarette. “Politics are dirty. And I didn’t like the cut of his jib.”  
     “Politics are dirty, but you’re sitting in a car with the president. It seems to me that your company is not above getting in bed with the government if it means expanding itself.”  
     “Would you spit on the milkman just because you don’t like him? Good luck getting your milk after that.” You flick your ashes off in a tray. “It’s not greed, believe me. Maybe for some people it is.” You’ll take another inhale. “I’ll cooperate with people I don’t like or trust because I want to see mankind enter a new era. I want to see technology and science advance as far as it can go. People are capable of fantastic inventions, things you’d only imagine in your dreams. I want to see it all become reality.”  
     “So the U.S. government is a stepping stone on the way to that goal. That doesn’t sound very patriotic to me.”  
     “It doesn’t matter if I sound patriotic or not. The bottom line is that you will reach the moon before the Russians do, and my scientists will help you do it. Keep that in mind the next time you feel like coming down on my head.”

     He simply stares at you. You stare evenly back at him, mostly thinking about how huge his head is. You don’t think you’ve ever seen a man with a head so bulbous. It’s sort of impressive.

     “God help the man who tries to get in your way, Dr. English,” he finally sighs as he pulls a cigar out of a slick wooden box. “You’ll be pestering us for quite some time, won’t you?”  
     You smile wide and lean forward to light his cigar. “You’d better believe it.”


	17. 1976

     You will be sixty-six when Skaianet learns how to have fun.

 

     Three years ago you bought a newfound company that called itself Atari. It surprised you, how no one ever got as excited about acquiring a dumpy regional appliance manufacturer or even a big-name technology giant the way people in Skaianet got excited about Atari. A new division will open up for the creation of technology for entertainment’s sake. Skaianet nestles into an office in downtown Rochester, New York, where departments have been set up for graphics, for music, for character design and marketing and packaging and advertising. You have been told this is a good investment, which you are inclined to believe. 

     Skaianet has already burrowed itself into the market of what people  _ need  _ to buy – you want people to buy things because they  _ want  _ to. That’s what Betty does. No one needs a foot-tall devil’s food cake with vanilla ice cream on top, no one needs a subscription to a magazine that tells them how to organize pillows on a couch, no one  _ needs  _ a device that whips egg yolk into a foamy paste. Your stepmother is good at influencing people – she makes people believe they need things they don’t. You’ve tried to counter this many times, but in the end, people – wealthy, American people with 2.5 kids and a disposable income – will always prefer the frivolous over the practical. So if you don’t want Crocker to horn the spotlight you’ve managed to grab, you will have to learn how to entertain.

     So you will start making video games.

     A team of programmers will invite you to test run a game called  _ Temple Frog _ , in which a plucky archaeologist uses puzzles and an uncanny ability to jump ten feet in the air in order to uncover the hidden temple of the frog goddess. It will seem a little esoteric to you, and since your left ear hasn’t been so good at picking up high-pitched tones lately, a lot of the in-game 8-bit sounds go over your head. But your programmers are young, “hip” and “groovy” and “with it.” They wear bell bottoms and know where fashionable restaurants are. So you’re content to leave the big creative decisions up to them.

     “Jump! Jump, onto that platfor– ah, it’s too late. Good effort.”

     The programmers share a laugh as your character plunges to her death in a pool of lava. A little clique of artists are hogging the best sofa in the lounge, so you perch in an office chair rolled in from a meeting room. You tut and slam your hand against the clunky joystick. Your character begins her quest over again, bobbing idly at the end of a dimly-lit tunnel.

     “We’re going to have a cheat code for this level, I think. What is it, uh, up-down-down….”  
     “We haven’t figured it out yet,” explains another coder with a bushy, unkempt beard. He strokes the scraggly hair as he talks. “Don’t want to overpower her too much, or else players won’t be challenged.”  
     “And the memory chip will be overloaded,” adds a sound designer with her hair tied up in a bright purple scarf.   
     “How do I grab onto the vines again?” you ask.

     Several people will say “B” at the same time. Your plucky lass grabs onto a vine too late and tumbles into a pit of spikes. Her body flashes red as she takes damage and regenerates at the beginning of the level. You think it’s very quaint that you can keep trying even after you’ve died ten times.

     “I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Oh, well. Here –  trade me.” 

     You will pass the joystick to a technician sitting criss-cross on the floor. Ms. Lalonde works on the design of the physical gaming consoles – her preference for practicality over aesthetics is something you have in common. It’s one of the reasons why you chose her to catch your meteor child. Ms. Lalonde trades you the joystick for her baby daughter. You bounce Rosie on your knee and let her pull on the curly ends of your hair.

     When you gave your engineers to NASA, they continued to work for you. Through them you’ve been able to watch the stars, to peer out into the darkness and catch the ones that fall. Last December, when the sky parted and your meteor fell, an armed car drove Ms. Lalonde out into the woods to retrieve what the fallen satellite left behind. And then you gave her maternity leave. Standard procedure.

     Unfortunately, another meteor fell the day before Ms. Lalonde became a volunteer guardian. You couldn’t get an agent out there quickly enough. When Skaianet finally forced its way past police lines and emergency vehicles, someone else had already collected the meteor child who crashed into the heart of Houston. You will not have trouble imagining another person who has experience catching children from the sky.

     You will look in the bathroom mirror a lot these days, leaning in so close that your breath fogs the glass, looking into one eye and then the other. Is there comet dust still in you, is that scar on your forehead from when you bounced to earth?  _ What is it about you _ – you will want to ask Rosie Lalonde –  _ what is it about me, that makes me different?  _

     Is there a code written in the two of you, a shared strain? Are the two of you, your brother, the little meteor child in Houston – are any of you human at all?

 

     You’re torn from your navel-gazing when Rosie yanks hard on your hoop earring. You gasp with pain and pry her chubby baby fist off of the dangling jewelry. The programmers watching start to laugh. Someone will coo and say “ _ so cute _ .”

     “Silly girl,” you scold. “We’ll just have to take these away, won’t we?”

     With Rosie holding onto the lapel of your coat, you unfasten your earrings and pull up your sylladex with a flick of your hand. Only three fetch modi are available to the public, and strife syllabi are still under final review by the Army unit that’s been beta-testing them. So you use a simple Tree Modus that you prefer for its alphabetical and elegant structure. Rosie grasps for the colorful, lime-green cards as you captchalogue the earrings, which scoot to the left of a pocket dictionary and a memory chip. Then you swish the cards away, and Rosie pouts.

     “There,” you say as you bop her on the nose. “You’ve lost your privileges.”  
     “Ah, sorry,” Ms. Lalonde says as she glances at you over her shoulder. “She’s a grabber. Thus the bun.” She points at the pile of hair atop her head, shocks of gray through the fading brown.  
     “Well, at least we know her motor skills are coming along.”

     Ms. Lalonde mumbles and curses in her nasally Canadian French when she can’t get the archaeologist’s inventory to pop up. A man with a pencil-thin moustache retrieves a soda can from his sylladex, which evidently shook it up, because when he cracks it open it spills onto his lap.

     “Her propensity for uh, seizing everything in sight is why she doesn’t wear the hair ribbons you gave her,” she’ll mutter as she squints hard at the screen. 

     The archaeologist equips something called the Gauntlet of Yaldabaoth. You hope there is not a museum somewhere hoping to get that artifact back in one piece.

     “What a relief.  I assumed it was because you thought they were ugly.”  
     “Are you kidding? The pink and purple – so cute. Very chic. She pulls them off though. I thought she would strangle herself.” Ms. Lalonde jams the joystick to the left, leaning sideways like it will make the archaeologist move along with her. “Child has a deathwish.”  
     “Is that so? Do you have a deathwish, Rosie? Is it true?” you will coo as you bounce her up and down.

     Rosie’s eyes are a dull violet, almost gray. You prefer dogs over babies any day of the week, but she’s just so darn adorable with her itty bitty socks and the tiny buttons on her dress. Something about baby clothes makes you emotional, just how very tiny they are. Rosie will give you a dopey smile when you plant a kiss on her forehead.

 

     You could say, if you felt like playing the psychiatrist, that you are living vicariously. A few years ago your baby brother had a son. Someone was kind enough to tell you before you had to find it out from the newspaper. His wife is pretty, you thought. Their house is big, with a nice front lawn for a swing or a dog. Your heart hurts when you think of the little life they’ve carved out for themselves. Recently, John started appearing in comedy movies. They gave him a radio show. You’ve seen children with his movie characters on their lunchboxes. It must be very nice to have so many people like you and to not worry about car bombs and snipers.

     Betty just likes to keep him on his toes. The occasional assassination attempt to keep him sharp and perceptive, just like her. Her favorite little boy.

     “When is  _ Temple Frog  _ coming out?” you’ll suddenly blurt out.

     Several people say “December 15th” at the same time, except for one artist who says “December 16th” and is promptly glared at.

     “What else is in the Christmas lineup?” you press.  
     The woman with the purple scarf counts them on her fingers. “Oh,  _ Golden Moon _ ,  _ Strife Attack! _ ,  _ Reign of Typheus _ ….”  
     “ _ Grub Farmer  _ comes out just after New Year’s,” the bearded man cuts in.  
     “You.” Snapping your fingers, you’ll point to a man in marketing whose primary character trait is the colorful ribbons he wears as a belt. 

     The man in marketing is wearing his skulltop, the two eyes flashing red and purple and yellow, so the woman sitting next to him elbows him in the side.

     “Me?” he says. He struggles to remove the helmet, shaking his head when it messes up his hair.   
     “You. How quickly can you get a console and a crate of beta copies shipped?”  
     He blinks. “What, a box of  _ Temple Frog _ ?”  
     “No, everything. Everything that came out this summer, everything coming out through the end of the year. And uh, that farming game, if it’s halfway playable.”

     Rosie begins to pull on your hair again. You lean your face towards her and let her do it so it won’t hurt as much. You have the sneaking suspicion that she might be drooling on you.

     “Well, that should be simple enough,” the man in marketing says. He fixes the wrinkles in his shirt like he’s just remembered that you are his boss’ boss’ boss’ boss and not just an old woman who doesn’t understand video games. “Tomorrow morning, I suppose. Is it–”   
     “Good,” you interrupt. “Leave it with Lalonde, I’ll pick it up on my way back home.”  
     “Sure,” Ms. Lalonde says without looking at you. “I’ll be here by seven. Got a to-do list to clean up.”

     Her player character reaches the end of the level, where a blue woman with flowers in her hair presents her with a shiny frog-shaped amulet. Stretching her arms above her head, she reaches out and makes grabby hands at you. You pass her back Rosie, who gives a big yawn before clamping down on the chain of her chunky necklace.

 

     A four-year-old probably isn’t grown up enough to play a game with a joystick, much less read anything on the screen. Maybe his father will play them with him. It will make you smile to think of John futzing around with the wires and the plugs to set up the console. No one ever said you can’t send Christmas presents to your estranged brother and a nephew you haven’t met. 

     This will be the tamest gift you’ve sent in a decade, probably. Last year you gave John a Mars rock the size of a child’s head. You have never gotten a gift from John Crocker, though. That’s okay. You’re not his sister anyway. You’re not Jade Crocker.

     Rosie reaches across her mother’s arm and tugs on your pant leg. Living vicariously will have to do, you and this fashionably late meteor child. You lean down and pinch her cheek.


	18. 1980

     You will be seventy when you take the fall for something you didn’t do.

 

     By itself, this should not be new or shocking to you. You used to take the fall for John all the time, even when he didn’t want you to. You allowed yourself to be locked in the shed and to hold buckets of water until your arms strained, you submitted to a laundry list of indignities that made your teeth clench and your ears burn. You have never had to go into hiding for it before now.

     Three months ago an explosion goes off at Betty Crocker headquarters in Minneapolis. An administrative building is lost. Men and women in red are uncovered from rubble on live television. Statements go out, thoughts and prayers, a fundraising hotline goes up. You have to take your hat off to whoever did this, whoever kicked Betty right in the head, but you were not responsible. National news will have its theories. Foreign men and capitalist intrigue. But you always did walk around with a target on your back. 

     When the smoke is still smoldering on CBS, gunfire goes off in the parking garage of your tower in Pittsburgh – the one you happen to be staying at. Texas phones to inform you that there are drones in the backyard of your rowhouse in Boston. Part of your kitchen gets blown up. During a CBS commercial break, a security guard in the lobby dies. Chaos on the lower floors. Elevator service is halted. You’re led up a stairwell to the roof, where a helicopter takes you out of the city.

     For the next three months you will be staying in a bunker somewhere underneath Carlisle, Massachusetts. It will seem excessive to you. Cowardly. On the other hand, a bullet to the head doesn’t sound great. So you will wait for things to die down.

 

     In three months you will learn that boredom doesn’t suit you well.

     You will try to teach yourself card tricks. The cards are too short and thin, and your fingers tremble when your blood sugar gets too low, so you end up spraying the cards every which way. You start a tentative house of cards with a bare bones foundation because you are scared of it collapsing. You practice making a quarter appear from behind Texas’ ear. He is a very good sport about it. If you were any more bored you’d be making towers of canned goods.

     Sometimes your television gets enough reception for a patchy period of entertainment, rough around the edges with static. You could get better reception if you didn’t want to tip off where you are underground, so you just live with the crappy quality and tell yourself it’s only temporary. One more commercial for Tab, though, and you might kill yourself.

 

     One night your brother appears on  _ The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson _ .

     He steps out from the garish multi-colored curtains and the crowd goes wild, the popcorn sound of staticy applause as he gives an aloof wave to the audience. Your brother is sixty-six now. His hair is mostly white – only a few streaks of fading black remain. He’s gotten better at dressing, though, however marginally; his bright red suspenders match his pocket square. His eyebrows need to be trimmed, you think. They’re almost as bushy as his moustache.

     “Thanks for having me Johnny, uh, Johnathan? What do I call you, we–” he laughs as he settles into the plaid-patterned sofa next to Carson’s desk. “We’re in a bit of a dilemma here.”  
     “That we are John, uh, I’m thinking we should flip a coin for it.”  
     “I’m thinking–” Your brother pauses to laugh. There’s a bit of static on screen, so you smack the side of the television. “I’m thinking the oldest gets first dibs. Sorry Johnny Boy.”  
     Carson throws his hands up to scattered laughter. His velvet suit is an awful salmon color. “Hey, if you’re gonna lose your name you might as well lose it to John Crocker –  _ John _ , are you gonna tell us about this new role?”

     Whooping and hollering as John laughs and adjusts his collar. He throws one leg over the other, bouncing his foot nervously. 

     “I like this guy ‘cause he cuts straight to the gristle. Man, you won’t even small talk with me, huh? What, you don’t wanna hear about the wife?”  
     “I apologize,” Carson laughs. “Awful of me, very rude. So your wife is…?”  
     “She’s great.” John stops and smacks his lips, looking over the audience without saying anything else. When they realize there’s no more to the joke, they slowly break into laughter again. “No uh, well, we just got back from New York–” Insert obligatory audience cheering. The audio briefly crackles with static. “– yes, and uh, we’re finished with the first season of – can I say it?” He cranes his neck as if looking for someone offset. “I can? Okay, well, we’re finished with the first season of  _ Night Court _ .”  
     “And this is, tell me a little bit, set the uh, scene for us.”  
     “What, it’s the night court Johnny, fill in the blanks.” John laughs. “Didn’t think I’d have to spell it out for ya. No uh, it’s very exciting, I’ve had a very good relationship with NBC over the years, they’re kind of – I kind of owe a lot to them, so I’m very grateful I got to write this show with them.”  
     “So you’re writing  _ and  _ starring in it? Sort of a ‘best of both worlds’ thing?”  
     “Yes, I –  so  _ Night Court  _ in a nutshell, it’s about the night shift of a criminal court down in uh, in Manhattan and uh, my character is the judge who well, who presides over it. And he’s getting up there in years, so he’s got kind of a wacky way of doing things, he’s –  we have a clip, don’t we?”  
     “We do, did you…? Let’s roll it.” 

     Carson points to the camera. The screen will transition to the inside of a dimly lit courthouse. You sigh loudly and lean back in your chair.

     “You appear pensive, Dr.,” Texas notes.

     You will grunt in response.

     “Master Crocker seems content.” Recently, Texas downloaded knowledge of how to knit. His needles clack together as he works on a blue scarf almost as long as you are tall.   
     “He does.” You rest your face against your hand. “ _ Night Court  _ actually looks pretty funny. I wonder if he really wrote it.”  
     “It would not surprise me.” Texas will loop a strand of yarn around his needle, which you think might just be a repurposed radio antennae. “Master Crocker tested quite a bit of his writing out on the household before he graduated. He could even draw a laugh out of the Baroness.”  
     “Huh. Imagine that.”  
     “She enjoyed his bit about ladies’ magazines. She said it was discerning.”

     On screen, John stands up in his black judge robes and bangs the gavel to uproarious laughter. The screen fades back to the talk show.

     “And that was a sneak peek at  _ Night Court _ . Very funny stuff. John, when can we expect it?”  
     “Thanks Johnny, you can catch it on NBC on uh, September 27th.”  
     “September 27th. Mark your calendars folks.”  
     “Well Johnny, I’ll send a prayer out for the sad folks who do.” John laughs and bobs his foot. “Save it for your kid’s birthdays, huh? Seriously though, seriously, it’s been a treat. It’s just been – writing with a team on a movie, you know, you do the work for a little while, bim bam boom, it’s done, you go home. It’s gonna be really interesting – it’s a challenge, you know? It’s a challenge uh, writing something that’s uh….”  
     “Sort of serialized, huh?”  
     “Serialized, yes. Making the characters eh, evolve and change.” John clears his throat. “Gotta be careful how I say it, geez Louise, like I’m writing the next great American novel.”

 

     You already know you will not watch his show because you do not like to seek out John’s content. You don’t like to watch him on screen, a passive observer like all the rest. The people who watch his movies and read his books probably know him better than you do by now. Fifty-four years have passed since you spoke to him face to face. Every cell in his body has died and been replenished with another, and quite literally, he is several persons removed from the not-brother you had. It just makes you sad. So you don’t think about it.

     You will shuffle the cards you have left and take two of them to add to your house of cards. You’ve added a second story, which is plenty of progress from yesterday. They shiver in your hands.

     “I’ve got to get out of this place,” you mutter.  
     “Drs. Andersen and Mooney have greenlit us for the end of the week. And they would know. Mooney hasn’t taken a step outside Minneapolis in two months.” Texas reassures. You already know this, but the end of the week feels ages away. “Perhaps you should clear your head. Shall I prepare the shower?”

     “And you had quite a vacation not too long ago, didn’t you?” Carson asks John.

     There’s an interruption in the reception. Bands of static skitter across the screen and disappear.

     “–took our son to Aruba, have you been? Lovely island, we had a spectacular time. We–”

     The television unleashes a harsh buzz of static. You drop the two cards onto the house you’ve built, and the whole set comes crashing down.

     “Dr. English?”  
     “God damnit. God  _ damnit _ .” 

 

     You slam your fists against the table, and all at once the anger and the frustration and the misery comes out in convulsing waves. You start to scream, you press your hands to your face, and finally you begin to cry.


	19. 1985

     You will be seventy-five when you’re invited to speak at a peace summit in Washington, D.C.

 

     The Cold War will not be over yet, but since you’ve done your part to humiliate Soviet scientists on more than one occasion, you will feel obligated to take part in patching things up. Obligation is a powerful thing, even if lights and cameras have made you want to crawl out of your skin for the better part of three decades. You will put on your best black and white and comb your silver hair until it shines.

     When the time comes, you will feel that the speech is forgettable. People didn’t come here to listen to an old woman lecture them about environmental accountability and the importance of taking responsibility for what you create. They came here to listen to two old  _ men  _ chatter and shake hands. So you don’t feel too bad that you have to rely on flash cards behind the podium. You’ll just want to climb back in your car and go home.

     “Thank you for having me,” you conclude with a soft smile. You’ll nervously fidget with the flash cards, flipping through them repeatedly with your thumb. “And thank you for you time. Now, I believe we have time for questions?”

     There’s a brief period of applause when you’ve finished. Your hand travels to your hair, looking out over the sea of people and lights. Lights from video camera, lights from camera flashes. A flurry of hands go up. The drone armor under your dress suddenly feels oppressive.

     You will point to a man in a blue suit who you recognize as a CNN reporter who’s over-eager to please. He asks you about Skaianet’s environmental policy, to which you give a curt answer. You have never been very good at speaking publicly because you don’t know how to explain things in layman’s terms. You either end up sounding too smart, or dumbing it down so much that you come across as condescending.

     Camera shutters go off. You take a deep breath and flicker your focus to the portraits that line the wall. You will call on a twiggy blonde reporter who’s sitting in the back by a white column. She springs upright so quickly that her chair scoots behind her. In a squirrely voice – you’re guessing she may be an intern – the reporter asks you how Skaianet will continue working with the military now that peace accords are being reached with the USSR. A decent question for an intern. You reply that Skaianet has no current plans to renew its military contract, but will continue to fund and contribute to NASA’s ongoing mission.

     Then a woman in a red pantsuit stands up in the front row. Her fluffy black hair is held up by the sheer weight of half a can of hairspray. Before you can select another reporter, she thrusts her microphone forward and begins to speak in a deceptively booming voice.

     “Dr. English, how would you respond to allegations that Skaianet has been involved in anti-capitalist terrorism?”

     Murmurs ripple through the crowd. The people around her furrow their eyebrows and sneer at her, but mostly an unsettling quiet has been thrown upon the room. You notice that your mouth is hanging open, so you clear your throat and tuck a strand of gray hair behind your ear.

     “Excuse me?”  
     “Betty Crocker Incorporated has issued a statement regarding Skaianet’s involvement in undermining both its own infrastructure as  _ well  _ as smaller companies.” Of course – you see it now, the enamel spoon-shaped pin on her lapel. “Final investigation has now implicated Skaianet in the 1980 incident that occured in Minneapolis, in which thirty-six civilian lives were lost at Betty Crocker headquarters.”

     Murmurs turn to a rumble of dissenting voices. Hands go up, people call out to be answered. You’re suddenly aware that cameras are snapping pictures of your stunned face.

     “Dr. English, are you opposed to competition by other American-founded manufacturers?” the woman in red continues.  
     “Competition?” you laugh. “You’re asking me if I’m afraid of a little competition?”  
     “Furthermore, Dr. English, Betty Crocker is in contact with sources from the Environmental Protection Agency that have revealed that Skaianet used its lobbying for protection of the ozone layer in order to harm the advancement of several American manufacturers. They estimate that your company’s aim to reverse ‘climate change’ has resulted in the loss of about eleven thousand jobs.”

     The other reporters in the room can’t wait any longer. A number of them spring up and begin hollering their questions over the din – you will catch individual words like “USSR” and “collusion” and “interference” and “abuse of funds.”

     You flip through your index cards too hard, and they all go spraying across the podium.

     “Let’s get one thing straight.” You straighten your shoulders and look down your nose at the squirming mass of people. “We won’t even go into Skaianet’s own 1980 incident – I feel that it speaks for itself that the men who were arrested in Pittsburgh were former General Mills employees, so we’ll leave it at that. But let me make one thing very clear. If you’re implying that marketplace competition is un-American, I would ask you to suggest an alternative. I would also ask you if you’d direct the same question to any other American corporation that has bolstered this economy by creating thousands of jobs,” you add sharply. “Furthermore, your line of questioning is wholly inappropriate for this venue, where we’re gathered to build bridges and further understanding between two nations.” You take a deep breath. The corners of your mouth are puckering, which you know makes you look like a disapproving headmistress. “Now, if Betty Crocker wishes to pursue this trail of allegations, I welcome them to do so. We should count ourselves lucky that we have a judicial system that makes it possible.”

     When you are finished you will exhale so hard that you feel the air has left your body. Camera shutters flash in clusters of bright light. Hands continue to wave, but you have lost your patience with the masses, the squealing dirty primitive public. How quickly they will turn, without rhyme or reason. These undeserving ingrates who have no idea that  _ you’re  _ protecting them, that  _ you  _ stand between them and the sea witch. You suddenly wonder why you’re protecting them at all.

     “Again, I thank you for your time. That will be all.” You will turn on your heel and disappear behind the curtain, and all the while the rumble of dissention does not quiet itself.   
  


     “Dr. English–” Texas starts as he takes your scarf. You snatch the microphones and wires off the front of your dress.   
     “What the  _ hell  _ was that?” you snap at Drs. Andersen and Mooney. “Part of your job description was making sure people like  _ that  _ woman didn’t make it to the press room. Was the pantsuit not enough to tip you off?”  
     “We tried, Dr. English–” Anderson squeaks–   
     “But of course she has security of her own–” cuts in Mooney–  
     “You either had to risk playing hardball–”  
     “Or let a drone take out part of the White House–”  
     “You don’t make those decisions on your own,” you bark. You pull your hair out of its ponytail and shake out the bouncing curls of gray. “ _ That _ is not your call.  _ That  _ does more than just ruffle my feathers. There are consequences to slip-ups like this.”  
     “Not to be the bearer of bad news, but she’s right.” Ms. Lalonde appears behind them, nervously thumbing the pendant around her neck. “Can we talk, Jade?”

     Oh, no. The soft sadness of her face – your heart begins to sink. You leave the men behind and follow her into the back hallway.

 

     “I want to start off by saying that I believe you,” Ms. Lalonde says gently. Her heels click against the marble. Outside in the courtyard, men are clustered in groups of black and blue suits. A man laughs and claps someone on the back.  
     “Why wouldn’t you?”  
     “You know what I meant. I  _ mean _ , I think you handled it in the best possible way.”  
     “But?”  
     “But our stocks have taken a small nosedive. It’s not something I heard down the grapevine, either. It’s–  er, well it’s already on TV. When they’re not playing footage of Reagan licking boot, that is.”  
     “There’s no such thing as a ‘small nosedive.’ Either it dips a little or it plummets, the two words are not compatible.” You cross your arms tight across your chest and stop in the middle of the hall. “Why don’t you give it to me straight before I have to hear it somewhere else?”

     Double-doors open. A stream of people comes out of the press room and begins to scatter. A woman in a blue dress starts to speak to you as she strolls by, but you raise your palm to her face. She walks away huffing in indignance.

     “We lost our IBM partnership,” Ms. Lalonde sighs. “They were considering it even before you went live. Betty Crocker’s review of 1980 has been going around the circuit for about a week now. It seems we’re the last to know.”  
     For a moment you just stare at a speck of gray in the marble. “Anyone else?”  
     “All we know is that Microsoft is on the fence about moving forward with the Skaianet Exhibition. And if we lose them, there won’t be much of an exhibition at all.”  
     You kiss your teeth. “We’d have plenty to show. It’d just be a little sad, like – like a kid having no one show up to his birthday party.”  
     “Do we  _ really  _ have plenty, though?” Ms. Lalonde will ask with infuriating gentleness.

 

     Okay, no, you don’t. You had to stop producing plasma pistols and their canon cousins because they interfered with a new military contract. Legally, they couldn’t be marketed anywhere else. And then the demand for video games slowed to a crawl, so you slashed that branch in half and redistributed its employees elsewhere. If you put on an expo now, you’d have no eye catchers, nothing to reel them in and keep them in. Maybe a new, sleeker model of the skulltop, or an exclusive collector’s edition of strife syllabi. It’s hard to face facts and admit that you need the help of other people to keep yourself relevant. It’s even harder to admit when you’re not in your prime anymore. Betty cannot take Microsoft away from you.

     You hold your face in your hands. Ms. Lalonde tries and fails to reassure you with a squeeze of your shoulder.

     “I know you hate it when I say it’ll be okay, so I won’t.”  
     “We’re stepping in some serious shit, aren’t we?”  
     “Yeah. We are. But ‘we’ is the keyword. You may have founded Skaianet, but don’t forget you’re not the only capable one. Let someone else take the reins for a little while. I’ll make some phone calls.”  
     “Phone calls won’t get IBM back.” You pinch the bridge of your nose. “I’m sorry. I know you’re trying to help.”  
     “I know.” Ms. Lalonde will give you a tight-lipped smile and let go of your arm. “I’ll try to put out as many fires as I can. Could I ask you to keep an eye on Rosie?”  
     “You brought her here?”  
     “No one said I couldn’t. She’s wandering around here somewhere.” 

     To the surprise of both you and the people within earshot, Ms. Lalonde will put two fingers in her mouth and let out a shrill two-tone whistle. Within seconds Rosie will appear behind a pedestal, peering past the vase of Easter lilies it supports.

     “You found me,” she says matter-of-factly. Her mother has dressed her in a black and purple dress that’s half velvet, half sparkly tulle – reminiscent of a ballet recital. She munches on the cubes of cheese in her hand.  
     “Where did you get that?” her mother asks.  
     “They were serving crudite.”  
     You smack Rosie on the back. “C’mon kid, we’re going for a walk.”

  
  
  


     “Let me give you some advice Rosie – never get old.”  
     “You don’t look very old to me.” She flags down a waiter, who leans down and allows her to pluck a little cup of water off his tray.  
     “You’re a flatterer.” 

     You will turn your hands over, just looking at them. Out in the courtyard, groups of people are mingling. The two of you – the ancient old woman and the twiggy little girl – are invisible. If you were younger, you might be watching everyone from some high balcony, swirling your drink and sneering past a popped collar. Too smart and too famous and yes, even too pretty for the public. You wouldn’t have ever admitted the third part aloud, but you were always very aware of how other people noticed your appearance. It’s slipped away from you now, a bit more every year until no one notices at all. You trace the black neckline of your dress, the moles on your collarbones. How the mighty have fallen. Hard to believe, now, that  _ Popular Science  _ named you “Nuclear Knockout” in 1962.

     “I didn’t used to have so many veins. I don’t even know where  _ this  _ one came from,” you grumble, pointing to a thin bluish vein between your pinky and ring fingers.  
     “My mother says I’m getting a callous. I suspect violin practice to be the culprit.”  
     “How old are you again?”  
     “Nine and a half.”  
     “I have calluses older than you.”  
     “That would not surprise me. Most things are.”

     She sips her tiny glass of water, clicking the toes of her Mary Janes together. You’re suddenly in the mood to drink, too. Reaching into the inner pocket of your dress, you will pull out a flask and pop it open. Rosie watches you gulp down half the whiskey left inside.

     “What’s in that?” she asks.  
     “Jack Daniel’s,” you respond through the burn in your throat. “What’s in  _ that _ ?”  
     “I think it’s Perrier.” She sets the glass of water aside. “Miss Jade, do you like your job? I am beginning to think seriously about a career path and would appreciate some input.”

     You don’t believe in laughing at children, so you hold back. She talks like a thirty-year-old woman. 

     “Sure, I like my job. The trick is finding something that doesn’t feel like work to you. For me, my career felt like a calling. Like something I  _ had  _ to do. That’s a powerful motivator at the end of the day.”  
     “You don’t appear to like your job today.”  
     “Who would? Speaking in front of a crowd bites the big one.” You will take another discreet sip from your flask. “Sometimes you have bad days with running a business. Today is one of those days.”  
     “I don’t think I’d like to run a business, or be anyone’s boss. When you’re someone’s boss, there’s always the chance that someone down the line will disappoint you.”  
     “That’s as astute observation. To which I would say – you only hire people you trust.” Taking a gulp of whiskey, you add, “Sometimes people  _ do  _ screw up, even if you put total faith in them. That’s a part of life you can’t avoid. You just have to take responsibility and move on.”  
     “Saying wise things must come with the territory of being old and veiny.”

     You shoot her a sharp glare, but Rosie is giving you a narrow-eyed grin. She’s messing with you. You run your hand through her hair, smoothing out the flyaways.

     “Your mother needs to cut your hair. I liked it when it was short.” You pick apart her bangs, which are uneven on the left side, made more obvious by the black hairband she wears in it. “What happened here?”  
     “Mother allowed me creative reign. I’ll be the first to admit that the results are unsatisfactory. I take responsibility and move on.”  
     “So hairstyling is out as a career path, then.”  
     “Indeed.”

     For a while you will just watch the streams of people go by. The occasional suit recognizes you, then catches the look in your eye and keeps it moving. You tap out an irritated beat on the metal of your flask. Rosie watches you out of the corner of her eye.

     “Does it taste any good?”  
     “Hm?”  
     She nods at it. “That. Mother drinks plenty of it. She told me it’s poison, which I  _ know  _ is hyperbole, but I was hoping you could keep it real with me.’”  
     “Does it taste good?” The corner of your mouth twitches. “No.”  
     “Why do people drink it, then?”  
     “Well, I guess the answer is different for everyone. For me, it’s a kind of painkiller. I’ve got creaky joints, remember?” You will roll your bad wrist at her until it whines. Rosie makes a disgusted face. “It’s better for you than smoking, anyway. Made it easier for me to kick that nasty habit. Here, why don’t you try it?”  
     “You’re serious?”  
     “What’s the harm? It’s between me, you, and whoever happens to be looking over here.”

     Rosie looks around her, tugging her earlobe nervously. Quicker than you can say ‘blood alcohol content,’ she will snatch the flask, take a quick sip, and throw it back into your hands. You laugh as she sticks her tongue out and crinkles her face.

     “Bluh! She’s right, it  _ is  _ poison.” Rosie wipes her mouth.  
     “That’s a life lesson learned. Now you know better.”  
     “If growing up means that I have to drink this stuff, then yes, I suppose I’ll be taking your advice.”  
     “Dr. English –  I hate to interfere,” Texas starts from behind you. He rests his hand on Rosie’s shoulder. “Good afternoon, Rosie, how are we today?”  
     “Actually, I’m trying to get people to call me ‘Rose’ now. It’s time to upgrade my brand.”  
     “Very well, Rose. Dr. English, there’s a car ready to take you to the airport. A meeting has been arranged in Boston to address today’s events.”

     Rose will be looking at you carefully, scanning you in that horrible, discerning way that children do. You give her a placating smile.

     “How do things look, Tex? Give me a preview.”  
     “I have twenty-seven voicemail logs and twelve electronic mail transcripts on my disc that will summarize things quite well. Time is of the essence.”

     You shake your flask, but there’s nothing left inside – Rose drank it all. You let Texas take your hand and pull you upright, your knees groaning in complaint.

     “Come along, Rose, let’s get you back to your mother. I think we’ve got a flight to prepare for.”  
     “It’s fortunate, then, that you gave m–”  
     “Hey, hey! Between us, remember?” You pat her hard on the shoulder and push her along. 

 

     The sinking sun has stained the sky yellow. Now the heavy blanket of late afternoon is upon you. You always hated this time of day, the time when mothers come down from their studies, the time when kitchen lights turn on and the stove hums and the kettle shrieks. The time when families gather around the dining table.

     Horrible.

     “Dr. English. Are you coming?”  
     You pull up your wild mane of silver hair. “Yeah. Let’s put out some fires.”


	20. 1996

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ==> AO3 reader: Skip to the End.

     You will be eighty-six when you catch a falling star.

 

     Eighty-six on the dot, actually. When the sky parts and a meteor comes down in Washington, it will be December 1st, your birthday and his.

     “I don’t like being here,” you will murmur to the tinted window.  
     Texas begins a new row in the winter hat he’s knitting. “I know, Dr. English.” 

     An armed, black vehicle rumbles through the Washington backwoods, over unpaved roads littered with the soft detritus of fallen, rotting leaves. Crows flap through the bare trees. Right now, you’re somewhere outside of Rosburg. Not far from the Crocker estate. Several miles, maybe.

 

     It will feel like it does when your blood sugar drops, your limbs all limp like noodles, your heart beating so fast that it feels like it isn’t at all. You can’t stop chewing your thumbnail. 

     You thought a lot about who should be the one to catch this meteor. You mulled it over when you hung up the phone with Dr. Ingram at Langley Research Center. You mulled it over as you tended the tomato plants in the back garden of your rowhouse. You mulled it over as you took the garbage down to the basement to be incinerated. You mulled it over when Ms. Lalonde came to visit. You mulled it over when Rose, home from school, asked you for your thoughts on her final English portfolio. You mulled it over as you attended the end of quarter financial review meeting, even though you should have been paying attention to the 2.1% dip in profits. What’s another 2.1% when you’ve already shut down the headquarters in Salt Lake City, Rochester, _and_ Boston?

     Drs. Andersen and Mooney can’t raise a child. Andersen can barely remember to inject his insulin, and Mooney once dropped Rose on the head as a baby. Ingram’s ten-member family lives packed together in a ranch-style house in Virginia. Kit would’ve been a good candidate, if not for that fact that Betty killed her in New York. Your stepmother always did love to break your things.

     “Do you think I can do this?” you ask Texas suddenly.  
     The joints in his neck need a spritz of WD-40. They will creak a bit as he shrugs. The car drives over a muddy pothole, and the two of you are rocked back and forth. “I think you can do anything you put your mind to.” He pauses. “Raising a child is different than earning a degree, though. It’s different from building a business.”  
     “And you should know.”  
     “And I should know.” Texas looks at you down his nose, methodically looping yarn ‘round his needles. “The Baroness was very hands-off.” 

     Late afternoon casts a gray shade across the woods. The car will make its way out of the trees and onto a lonely country road. Far off into the marshy fields of grass, you can make out barns with collapsing roofs, a hawk swooping low to snatch a mouse.

     You will try to remember a time that your stepmother picked you up, that she brushed your hair or dressed you up or tucked you into bed. Nothing will come to mind, only the sugary-sweet frosting scent of her skin, the flour on her apron, how it smelled like icing when she hit you across the face, her hands clammy. When you catch the falling comet and retrieve your starchild, will you feel as repulsed as she did? Will you be able to hold it, will you be able to touch it or care for it or feel anything at all?”

     “Don’t worry yourself, Dr.,” Texas says without looking at you. You pass a billboard with nothing on it, just peeling, yellowing paper. “You doted on Master Crocker when he was young. He cried, sometimes, when we cared for him –  like he knew we weren’t people. You were always able to calm him down.” His knitting needles clack. “If you treat this one half as well as you treat Rose, I’d say the youngster has nothing to fret for.”  
     “Rose is about to graduate college,” you will sigh as you squeeze the bridge of your nose. “And I let her drink out of my flask when she was little. I don’t know the slightest thing about… about _anything_.”  
     “Well, my memory drive retains plenty of knowhow from when the lot of us took care of you. I should be of some assistance.”  
     “Let’s hope so.” 

     Somewhere in the trunk is a pile of things Ms. Lalonde passed on to you. Books, a car seat, pacifiers, a mobile of the solar system. The first car in over an hour passes on your left. You watch the sun start to slip behind the treeline.

     “And by the way, happy birthday, Dr.”  
     You worry your bottom lip between two fingers. “Thank you, Texas.”

 

     The clouds darken, the sky murmurs with distant thunder. Your car picks up speed, bumping along the jagged, unpaved patches. You pass a dead doe splayed across the shoulder. You’re closing in on the coordinates, Oedipus returning to Thebes with the sphinx's blood on his hands. You are eighty-six and you are sneaking around behind your stepmother’s back. Nothing much has changed at all. 

     The car will veer down a pause in the guardrail and rumble down the dirt road. There’s a tractor sitting in the grass, old tires and a blue pickup with a “FOR SALE” sign in the window. When you drive far enough from the road, the trees thicken once more and you’re carefully winding through an unmarked one-way path. Glimpses of signs warning against the dangers of trespassing flash through the undergrowth.

     Texas will set aside his knitting and reach out to give your hand a gentle squeeze as the car begins to off-road it into an overgrown clearing. The sky is losing light now, even more so through the tinted glass. The engine cuts, you shudder to a halt.

     Warm air whips around you as you get out of the car, bending the trees, whistling through branches. Staring up at the roiling clouds, you tighten your goggles and hitch your fireproof gloves up to your elbows.

     “Dr.!” Texas shouts over the wind.

     He comes ‘round the other side of the car holding the shield you brought with you, the kind you’d see a SWAT officer hiding behind. You take it from him and motion him back to the car after you’ve put your earplugs in.

     “Get a move on, Tex, we don’t want you melting.”  
     “Right away, Dr. English.” 

     A thunder clap lights the sky up bright white. Clouds will part, will be vaporized by the blazing rock in the sky. Its tail washes the forest in red. The air begins to hum. Your hair floats, standing on end with twitches of electricity – photoacoustic transducers, the blazing light of spacetime translated into sound.

     It seems to take forever, just hovering in the sky for maddening minutes, and all at once it touches earth. Trees bend back and snap at the trunk. You plant your feet firmly in the mud and hold your shield in front of you. Branches fly by – one hits your shield and snaps into pieces. The car rocks from the pulses of heat and light and sound. All you will be able to do is hunker there and shield yourself, waiting for the rolling waves of sound to stop, waiting for the forest to stop tearing itself in half.

     And then the sky darkens. The air smells hot and burnt, sulfurous and metallic. Dizzy, you will straighten yourself, stumbling over to the car and supporting yourself against it. There are hairline cracks in the glass.

     The meteor has carved out the forest, and over the broken trees you will see the smoking crater it left behind. Somewhere inside is your star child. You adjust your goggles and start walking towards the center.

     The dirt is hot and unstable under your feet; several times you will stumble down the slope, tripping over clumps of undone earth. You will finally slide down the side of the crater on your hands and knees. And yards away from you, close enough to see, is a child in the dust.

     Your breath catches in your throat. Never have you seen it for yourself, what you might’ve looked like when the sky delivered you, what your stepmother saw when she picked John up and carried him home.

 

     There he is, your starshine, your red dwarf. His skin is dark and dotted with freckles, his hair all mussed up and black. Meteor dust smudges his face. You walk towards him slowly, carefully, as if afraid of frightening him off. You begin to lower yourself, to stretch your arms out towards him, and when the baby rolls over you will see that he’s holding a flint pistol in his chubby hands. He babbles at you, then pulls the trigger.

     “Jesus!” The bullet bounces off of your shield, cracking it almost down the middle. “What the _fuck_?”

     The shot crackles and echoes; it’s much too loud. The baby begins to cry.

     “Dr. English!” Texas cries from above. “Do you require assistance?”

     The baby is squirming, kicking its pudgy little legs. You raise your hand to Texas and shake your head.

     “Little one, oh, my _little_ one, who’s the idiot that gave you such a toy?” you murmur as you scoop to pick him up. First, though, you take the two flint pistols from the smoking earth and bury them in your sylladex. Several bones in your back creak as you straighten up.

     Wiping the dirt from his face, you’ll notice that he’s wearing little glasses, comically sized, and because he is so small they slip right off his face. You catch them with your free hand and see that his eyes are dark, a green close to black. Wet tears stain his face, but now he begins to blabber, drooling as he pulls your strands of wild hair.

     You just stand there, transfixed. All you do is blink when the child reaches up and grabs your lip, laughing at the look on your face.

 

     There’s a scrambling of boots down the side of the crater. Texas crunches through the rocks and pauses behind your shoulder.

     “What will be the name, Dr.?” he asks.

     You stand for a moment, brushing his tufts of hair out of his face. For a moment you are four years old, peeping through the cradle bars at the baby in your house, listening at the door for his babbling in the night.

     “I think,” you pull your goggles up so you can see him clearly, without the tint of lime green over everything. “I think his name is Jacob.”  
     “A fine name. We should endeavor to stay ahead of the drones.”  
     “Understood.” You clasp Jacob close to you, breathing in the smoky space-smell of him. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

 

     You’ll keep watching the sky for the drones, your face against the dark window, looking for the sharp beetle shape of their armor even as Jacob babbles and coos and beats his little fists against your jaw.

     “Shh, Jake, such an _excitable_ one you are.”

     You move him to your knee and begin to bounce him in the way Rose always liked. Texas has rummaged through Ms. Lalonde’s bins and dressed him in a sweater and a pair of shorts so unbelievably tiny that the size of its little buttons almost moved you to tears. The bouncing distracts him for a moment, but then he begins to tug on the band of your watch.

     “Why are we being so busy today, hm? Do you know it’s your birthday, little one?”

     Casting another nervous look out the window, you’ll notice a roadside exit sign for the street you know runs past the Crocker’s long driveway. Without meaning to, and regretting it immediately, you tap on the glass and ask the driver to take the exit.

     “Dr.?” Texas asks, his voice raised in incredulity.  
     “Just for a moment,” you snip. You begin to chew your thumbnail. “We won’t go any further than the road.”  
     “I don’t think this is a good idea.”  
     “Did I say it was?” You will be embarrassed by how angry you sound, how impatient. 

     The car rumbles to a fork off the exit. Gray expanse in either direction, nothing but fields and concrete. In two miles one direction, a BP gas station. In the other, a brown attraction sign advertising fishing at Plantation Lake.

     “Take the right,” you tell the driver.  
     Texas cranes his neck as you turn onto the wide, desolate road. “ _Fishing_?” he mumbles to himself. “Oh, my.”

     The car passes a shut-down gas station with its windows boarded up, two cars with Oregon plates and canoes on their roofs. A helicopter whirs overhead in the direction of the meteor you just left behind. Trees begin to thicken, dark and bare with their leaves piled in rotting blankets beneath them. The traffic lanes converge into just one on either side, and the car begins to wind through it carefully as you enter the hills. You will stare into them, looking for movement, looking for a familiar sight.

     “The train tracks can’t be far,” you say aloud to no one in particular. “You’d go into the driveway, up to the house where she cut down all the trees….” You run your finger over your bottom lip, fidgeting as your heart begins to race. “We may even pass the tracks here in a moment.”  
     “Perhaps, Dr., but the trains haven’t run for quite some time. Not since the 50s.”  
     “How do you know that?”  
     “Independent research. Like you, Dr., I grew up knowing nothing but the estate we looked after. Just the house and whatever the Baroness thought relevant for us to know. I was curious as to how it’d changed.”  
     “Not since the 50s,” you murmur. Jake is dozing in your arms now, the steady rocking of the car lulling him to sleep. Absentmindedly, you’ll brush his cheek with the back of your hand.

     A sign half-hidden in the trees advertises the turnoff for Plantation Lake.

     “There!” you bark, “Turn right now!”

     The car veers onto the gravelly path that winds into the woods.

     “Dr.,” Texas warns.  
     “Just for a moment, Tex, I promise you. I just want to see it. That’s all.”

     There are two halves of you, one half staggering away from that place, running away, pushing the the smells and the sounds down and further down until it’s burbling and bumbling at the bottom of your memory. The smell of the bed sheets and the curtains in your old room, the creaking floorboards in the library, John turning the pages of his books, how her crystal glassware felt when you spent the night shining them. Halley’s fur and the feel of the windows rattling as a train roared by. The sound of her heels, the feeling of her clammy hands. You’ve tried to stomp it all down into a paste, cover it with your machines and your robots and your inventions and your degrees and your books and it has never been enough. There is still that scared and sniveling half of you, young and angry with a white dwarf balled up inside her and something to prove, and that half of you is chomping at the bit, crying and gnashing her teeth, clawing toward the house that raised you, the house that did all of this to you.

     There is a half of you that needs to know it’s still standing, that evidence remains of you, of your childhood, of what happened when you were small. It will be so long ago by this point that you are desperate to remember how hot the terror felt, how fearful you were of making the wrong step, of muttering the wrong syllable, and some sliver of you wants to relive that fear like another, more fortunate girl may long to relive the warmth of being carried by her mother. That fear looked after you, that fear nurtured you and tended to you.

     You want to go towards the lake, to the thing in the water that she called her mother. You want to return to where the story of you started. You want to go into the water.

     “Look,” you gasp. “There’s the water. Stop, stop the car!”

     The engine will cut and you will leap out with Jake yawning and grasping at your hair. The surface of the lake is still, dark and shining with the reflection of the marble-gray sky. You tread carefully towards it, your boots crunching in gravel.

     “Dr.,” Texas says from the car.

     “ _Shh_.” You drop your voice to a whisper. The water is almost lapping at your feet. “Are you in there?’

     There is a silence that even the birds can’t break. Cold wind ripples across the lake, and then you see it – the bubbling in the center of the water. Jake presses his hands against your lapel, craning his neck to look out at the white tendrils poking out of the lake.

 

welcome home, hatchling.

 

     “You remember me.”  
     “ _Dr_.,” Texas says, sterner this time.

     The silvery lappets of her slimy flesh disappear under the water. You catch the shining of a beak, the blinking of oily eyes.

 

you had better get out of here while you can.

 

     You will stand there and wait for her to say something more, to explain herself or give some explanation that you don’t even know you’re asking for, but there is nothing else but the rippling of water and the crawing of ravens in the trees.

     Jake reaches up and grabs the strap of your goggles, and when they will not come loose he starts smacking your ear. You will look at him, his chubby face and those bright eyes, and you are ripped headfirst into the present. You are not the sad sixteen-year-old who thrives off of terror, the angry little girl trying to convince anyone at all that she is worth listening to, that there is something more to her than her stepmother. You are Dr. Jade English, Skaianet CEO, Nobel Peace Prize winner, published author and established astrophysicist. You have a fucking child to raise, and you’ve taken him into the belly of the beast.

     What the fuck is wrong with you?

     Shuddering, you squeeze Jake tightly and run back to the car. Texas is twiddling his thumbs when you throw yourself into the backseat and lock the door.

     “Go. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”  
Texas looks at his wrist, which slides back a panel and reveals the time. “It will be quite late when we return to Pittsburgh.”

     The car rattles back down the unpaved path, and soon enough you cannot see the lake anymore. You push your goggles up into your hair and rub your temple.

     “It doesn’t matter. I just want to go home.” 

 

     You close your eyes and rest your head against the window, feeling the car rock as it turns onto paved road. You will sit like this for a while, content to rest your eyes until you reach the airport in a couple hours or so. But then you hear Texas gasp. The car brakes in the middle of the road, and you blink your eyes open to see that another car is blocking it entirely.

     “What the hell…?”

     The car doesn’t move, just sits there. It’s similar to the one you sit in now, large and black with darkened windows.

     “Go around,” you shout, “drive between the trees!”

     The driver begins to do just that, but two more cars appear around the hill and halt there. You look behind you to see if you’re clear to throw the car in reverse and go the opposite direction. Then your blood goes cold as another car comes up behind you. You’re being boxed in.

     “What in the hell is this?”  
     “We should stay in the car,” Texas falters. “It can withstand whatever firearms they may have on them.”  
     You run your hand through your hair. “I’m not so sure about that. The meteor landing has already compromised the windows. And we shouldn’t forget where we are, either. I think they might have much more on them.”  
     “What do you propose, then?”  
     “I propose that we aren’t much safer in here than we are out there. Take Jacob. I’ll go out there and test the waters.”

     Jake whines as Texas holds onto him. Your flick your wrist to summon your strife specibus – the first thing to appear is Jake’s flint pistols, as if they’ll do anything for you. Texas stops your hand, jerking his chin to his own arm. Now is a very convenient time to remember that your bionic assistant has a plasma cannon in his forearm.

     Not without a decent dose of trepidation, you crack the door open and place one foot on the ground. You know how this goes. No sudden movements and no one gets hurt. You keep your hands elevated, away from your person. December wind blows dead leaves across the asphalt, the only sound beside your idling engine. The inside of their windows cannot be seen.

     You clear your throat. “Well?”

     Still there is nothing. No response, no sound. You are prepared to call Texas for backup when a large, dark shadow looms over you all.

**Unauthorized presence.**

     Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. You will lift your head to confirm what you already know is floating there. Deep red and horned like a beetle, the gleaming armor of a drone.

**You have been identified as Jade Crocker. Immobilizing.**

     It lifts its arm and blasts away the hood of your car with something like lightning, different from anything you’ve seen them use before. The force of it throws you to the ground – you cannot breathe, your body paralyzed with sharp pain. What’s left of your car doesn’t even burn; it will just smoke and smolder, the smell of soldered metal reeking in the air. The car bows forward now, its front tires blown. You can hear Jake crying in the backseat.

     More drones appear from the woods, candy red and enamel white against the bare oak trees. They lumber like ogres, branches bending and snapping against their shoulders and their spikes. Scrambling to your feet, you draw a plasma pistol from your strife specibus and shoot the first drone you see. Its chest lights up with an electrical surge, something like viscous, purple blood seeps out of it, and then it falls to its knees. Its teammates are quick to respond. In seconds you are in the crosshairs of them all.

     “Cowards!” you spit at no one in particular. “Having these hunks of metal fight your battles for you!” You spin around, prepared to fire into any of the windshields surrounding you. “Get out, if you’re going to do it! Let me see your faces!”

     Texas leaps from the car. His wrist snaps back and recesses to reveal the cannon inside his arm. It makes a sound like boiling water as it charges up.

     “Dr. English, seeing as it won’t do you any good, I won’t advise you to get back in the car,” he says, his voice edged with distress. He aims his wrist at the drone hanging above you. “That being said, I think you should duck.”  
     “That won’t be necessary.” 

     You turn on your heel to see that two people have stepped out of the vehicle parked behind you. First you will be confused, then recognition will set in, and finally you will be very, very angry.

     “What the fuck is this?” you spit.  
     “We can end this quietly–” Dr. Andersen says–  
     “Or we can do this the hard way,” says Dr. Mooney.

     Something about how stony they appear, how stoic – you can feel the blood drain from your face. Drs. Andersen and Mooney are not wearing their uniforms. You can’t make out the green skull of Skaianet on their coats, or on their cars, or on anything.

     More car doors open. Men and women step out, people you recognize, faces that have been in board meetings, faces that have escorted you to speeches, faces that shared your laboratories, that hid behind goggles and masks.

     “What the _fuck_ is going on here?” you snap, and you will be embarrassed because you can feel the clog of angry tears in your throat and it will make your voice crack. Your pistol trembles in your hand.  
     “This must be difficult for you, Dr. English,” says Dr. Ingram.  
     “I think you should lower your weapon and make this easier for all of us,” says the woman in Public Relations with the coiffed hair who edited your second Nobel speech.  
     “ _Fuck_ you!”

     You shoot at their windshield, showering it with spidery cracks that reek of sulphur. As they’re drawing their guns, you shoot at another drone and land a hit in the eye. Texas cocks his arm and shoots down the one in the sky. It falls to earth without ceremony, crashing onto the road between you and the car behind you.

**Halt, Imperial bot #0001548. Neutralizing.**

     One of the remaining drones seizes Texas by the top of his head. You hear the metal in his skull bend and break.

     “ _Texas_!”

     You raise your gun to shoot the drone in the arm, but you miss – your hand is shaking too badly, and you’re terrified you’ll hit your assistant instead. You prepare to pull the trigger again, but the woman with the coiffed hair shoots it out of your hand. It clatters across the asphalt and under your car.

     “Dr.–” Texas yelps.

     The drone seizes his torso with its other hand and tears his head from his body, thick oily strings of yellow-brown gushing from the circuits in his neck. Texas’ head goes soaring over the guardrail and into the woods. Crumpled on the ground, his body jitters with electricity.

     “ _No_!” you cry, your voice shrill with grief. “ _No_ , how _dare_ you!”  
     “That was a shame–” Dr. Andersen says–  
     “It didn’t have to come to that–” agrees Mooney–  
     “Do you wish to press the issue?” asks Andersen. 

     Dismayed, you will blink hard and tears will begin to spill. You will not raise a hand to wipe them away.

     “How long.”  
     “Would it do any good for you to dwell on it?” replies Mooney.  
     “Why.”  
     “Betty can be very convincing,” says another woman you haven’t heard speak yet, someone who ran the office in Salt Lake City. Hearing her say her name makes you flinch.  
     “And what does _Betty_ want from me?” you ask, tensing up for fear of the answer.  
     “The Baroness has come to the decision that your time playing with Skaianet has reached its conclusion,” Ingram drawls. How stiff he sounds, how laughable, like he’s reading off of a script. “As such, your privileges have been revoked.”  
     You scoff. “My _privileges_? Do you realize how you sound?” You straighten your shoulders, feigning bravery. “I don’t know what kind of little coup you’re planning, but this shit won’t fly in Pittsburgh. As soon as you blasted my fucking car, you alerted headquarters. How exactly do you think you’re going to get away with this?”

     The front passenger door of the furthermost car opens, and you hear the sound of a high heel click against the asphalt. When the door swings shut, you will see that it’s Ms. Lalonde, dressed in black and looking more miserable than you’ve ever seen her.

     “Jade,” she says gently, “there is no headquarters anymore.”

     Her words hang heavy, but you don’t absorb them because this cannot be happening, she cannot be in on this, the one you placed total trust in, you one you gave your first meteor child to. You entrusted Rosie with this woman, this woman who has the bright red Crocker spoon pinned to her lapel.

     “You,” you say, shivering with rage. “ _You_. I can’t believe I let you have her. I should’ve raised that girl myself.”

     It looks like you hit your target – Ms. Lalonde’s shoulders sink.

     “It wouldn’t matter anyway. Skaianet was never meant to last. I’m sorry you had to find out this way. I’m sorry you had to find out at all.”  
     “We don’t enjoy surprising you like this,” adds the woman with coiffed hair.  
     At a loss, you run your hand through your curls of gray hair. “What did you mean, about there not being a headquarters anymore.”    
     “Skaianet sold all of its assets this past hour,” Ms. Lalonde explains, her hand moving toward her collar in discomfort. “Its stock has been divided amongst the shareholders. The Pittsburgh office is being cleared as we speak.”  
     “To make a long story short, Dr., your business has gone bankrupt,” says the woman from Salt Lake City. “It will hardly come as a shock to anyone. I mean, you _did_ attend the quarterly review.”  
     “The ship’s sunk, Dr.–” Dr. Andersen says–  
     “Time to walk the plank,” adds Mooney. 

     Stumbling backward, you hold onto the side of the car. The hood has stopped smoking, and now you can see the dark, silvery sludge of the melted engine. Some part of you will hope that this is salvageable, that somehow this is all very wrong and someone will come to your rescue, but you are not little and this is not a storybook and you know how to recognize a hopeless situation when you see one.

     Your hand flits to the gun holster on your hip. “So this is it then?”  
     “For this chapter, yes. Your story isn’t over, though. The Baroness has another need for you,” the woman with coiffed hair says.  
     “For you _and_ the boy,” says Ingram.  
     “You will leave him _out_ of this.”  
     “Quite the opposite. The boy is a central player.”  
     “You don’t want to fight this, Jade,” Ms. Lalonde says gently. “We know you caught the meteor.”  
     “Touch him and I’ll blow you all to pieces,” you hiss.  
     “We have no desire to harm the child–” says Dr. Andersen–  
     “Nor to separate you–” assures Mooney–  
     “The two of you are headed for the same place–”  
     “Which you’ll find much better than the alternative.” 

     Ms. Lalonde walks up to you almost sheepishly, her face cast down as she hands you a thick manilla folder filled with notated papers, post-it tabs and pen marks. She will not look you in the eye.

     “We’ll escort you back to Pittsburgh,” she says softly. “It won’t do any good to fight.”  
     “Don’t do this to me, Callie,” you whisper.

     Her hand twitches, an instinctual flit to brush the hair out of your face, or to graze your cheek. She stops herself and drops her hand.

     “Calpurnia,” you press.  
     “When we land, you have two hours to gather everything you wish to bring with you. Someone will check your sylladex for whatever they deem dangerous or unnecessary. Please take the time to read this on the way there. It will debrief you on most of the basics. The Baroness was kind enough not to dump you in the middle of nowhere with no map.”  
     “How _dare_ you stand there and speak to me like that?” you say, trembling with fury. “Like you’re in control, as if I didn’t give you everything, as if _I’m_ not the reason you have that girl. I _swear_ , if you try to involve her in any of this–”  
     “I don’t think I’m in control,” she interrupts. “I don’t think any of us are.” 

     The woman from Salt Lake City takes Jake out of the car, despite his wailing and his beating of fists. She steps on top of Texas’ back – the puncture of her heel drawing yellow blood –  and thrusts him into your arms. You hold him close to you, shushing him and kissing him atop his head of fluffy black hair.

     “You’ll be coming with us, then,” she says, jerking her head to the car Calpurnia stepped out of. “We don’t have all day.”

     It takes a gun barrel nudged into your back to get you moving, shambling like a sleepwalker to the car you now recognize as one that came from Skaianet’s lot. It’s just missing the silver, skull-shaped hood ornament.

     What could you do, if you managed to flee the drones? Could you make it into the woods before someone shot you down? If you ran to the lake, might the sea monster protect you? If you kept on running, along the train tracks and into the dense trees, if you kept running until you saw the house, would you still be you? Could you run and run until you stripped off all the years, until you were young and twiggy with your hair up in ribbons, until you could do it all over again, better this time, and not let it all slip away? Could you run until the sky went dark, til you saw the lit-up windows of the Crocker estate, until the back porch light flickered to beckon you and your brother inside?

     You duck your head to climb into the backseat, and the door latches behind you. Jake is still crying. You rock back and forth gently, murmuring into your star-child’s ear, willing him to be quiet.

     The engine starts up, and the car begins to drive away. To where, you have only the slightest idea. At the beginning of today, you were Dr. Jade English, Skaianet CEO. Now, you are just Dr. Jade English, and that name doesn’t mean much of anything anymore.

 

     None of it really mattered, then, in the end. Your stepmother always gets her way.

     You close your eyes, and it will feel like you’re falling.


	21. 1998

     You will be eighty-eight when your home is finally finished.

 

     For a while you camped on the beach because your home was still a foundation of wooden planks and concrete in the largest clearing you could find. You cooked with propane, filtered salt water for bathing, used solar panels for the lanterns you carried into the jungle. When you armed yourself and trudged into the trees, Jake clung to your chest in a papoose. You didn’t trust him alone in the campsite, not even with the robots there to guard them. You didn't trust them to defend him from the things in the water, or the hooves of the things that lumber through the trees.

     You’d never had to hunt before, or fish, and you don’t much care for it. Calpurnia told you they would ship you rations every six months. You told her you’d rather starve.

     When you were not camping you did a lot of screaming. Something small would happen – a fire wouldn’t catch, or Jake refused to eat the dragonfruit you chopped into tiny chunks for him – and hopeless anger washed over you. You didn’t want him to see you like this, or to hear the prideful fury of Dr. Jade English brought low by something even a caveman could do. You went out into the trees and screamed your head off until swarms of squawking white birds flapped out of the branches. You kicked a boulder so hard that you stubbed your toe through your boot. You nicked your knuckles punching a tree. You cursed and yelled and tore your hair out until there was no fight left inside of you, and then you trudged back to the sand and went back to whatever you were doing before.

     “Isn’t camping fun, little one?” you cooed to Jake as you wiped the food from his cheeks one night, a bonfire flickering on the sand outside your tent.      “ _Neanderthalensis_ did this in Gibraltar, you know, before the climate change killed them. Isn’t that funny, my dear?”

     Jake did not have an opinion because he was only a baby and this was all he knew, besides hurtling through space on a white-hot rock. He fussed when you rubbed away the crust around his nose. Through the trees you could hear the sounds of soldering and the flashing of spotlights – your mechanical servants working hard through the night.

 

     The robots you call your helibots –  a recent invention without much practical marketability – built your jungle tower high into the sky. They 3D printed the cement base, they fitted the white sandstone blocks in sweeping spirals. You wanted it to stretch far above the treetops, above the volcano, far enough to see the planes that sometimes skate across the ocean, far enough to see the blanket of constellations that scatter across the sky like a box of marbles. When they finished the laboratory on the topmost floor, you outfitted it with a telescope that could catch the surface of Jupiter on a clear night.

     You felt a sort of satisfaction when the final helibots tucked in their wings and went into hibernation, having painted the walls and dusted away the concrete debris, polished the glass and straightened the picture frames. There was be some inconvenience, though, to having your new home completed. The noise and the raucous of the process – over a year start to finish – scared away many of the island’s native fauna.

     Well, not native, really. They’re alien in the most literal sense of the word.

     So the year will be 1998 and you will have spent two years on the island on which you’ll spend the rest of your days –  however frightfully short they may be – and now you have a whole new mess of things to worry about. You can worry about this loneliness, and you can worry about surviving, and you can think a lot about death.

 

     Five months ago, John Crocker died.

     A tall ladder and a young woman, they said. A book had come loose from the shelf and knocked him from his perch. He broke his neck. Dead before the ambulance came. Dead on his birthday.  Your not-brother, the boy with whom you shared that house, was due to inherit your stepmother’s company by the end of that April.

     A _Life_ magazine with his face on it arrives with a box of Betty Crocker brownie mix. You can imagine the TV specials, the montages of his life, movie clips and stand-up routines, tearful dedications at award ceremonies. You allow yourself to wonder whether he decided to follow in Sassacre’s footsteps, a stuffed corpse in front of the fireplace. The idea makes you want to throw up.

     You throw out the brownie mix and keep the magazine.

     For weeks you will feel nothing at all. You will wake up and head upstairs to Jake’s bedroom and get him dressed and ready and make him breakfast and clean up his mess and put away dishes and flip through notepads and file through your projects and fix Jake his lunch and arm yourself with your rifle and go out into the jungle and check your animal traps and collect your samples and come back to the tower and go over Jake’s alphabet and his numbers and put a video on for him and prepare for dinner and you will not think about John, you will not dream of the house and its endless expanse, you will not think of the boy on the other side of the wall and you will not think about how you left him behind, how you hid yourself away from him, how you locked yourself out of his life, and you will feed Jake dinner and get him washed and ready for bed and you will go up into your laboratory and you will not sleep at all.

     Texas had gigabytes of memories that you’d sealed away on a hard drive. You will watch John give a speech at his going away party. You watch him study for his end of semester exams at the kitchen counter while Betty bakes cupcakes. You watch him practice his comedy bits, resting his elbow on Sassacre’s stuffed shoulder, pretending they’re having a conversation to Betty’s amused laughter. You watch him grow tall, you watch him grow up. Then the memories run out, and you start at the beginning. You and John kicking each other under the dinner table, you and John in the library playing card games and John testing his pranks on you. You and John walking Halley in the garden during the summertime, you and John playing cowboys and Indians. You doze off in the middle of memory and pick it back up in your dreams. When you wake up confused and distraught, you’re not sure what year it is.

     If you still had colleagues in NASA, or colleagues at all, they might have tipped you off about the meteor that killed him. Another one of the same. You might have heard that the newest meteor child became a Crocker herself, and this would’ve somehow stung less than the loss of the Houston meteor. John’s boy always seemed to have a good head on his shoulders. The little astronaut should be safe with him. You would’ve thought this, anyway, if you had any way of knowing.

     You watch the world go by like the Lady of Shalott, catching reflected versions of the truth, never the full scope of it. The life you had, the life that continues somewhere off of this beach, is far away and foggy. You have trouble believing it ever existed at all.

     It’s like you’ve been grounded, sent to your bedroom without supper. _Out of my sight and up those stairs, little gill, and think about what you’ve done._ Once, your stepmother asked you if you knew what it felt like to spend your whole life working towards something, only to have it all taken away. You didn’t understand what she meant, why she looked so tired, defeated, worn down to the nub. But now, you think you do.

     In your lowest moments you will wonder if this is the worst it could get. You don’t have meetings to go to anymore, no phone conferences, no overseas trips and late night jet lag. You don’t have to worry about investors, you don’t have to care about keeping your hair neat and your collar popped and your lab coats pristine. You don’t even have to be pretty. It doesn’t matter if you shamble about the kitchen in your night clothes, your hair loose and disheveled. Your tomato garden doesn’t care if you have bags under your eyes. The petri dishes and microscope slides of fur and scale samples don’t give a shit if you’re still in your slippers.

 

     You still have work to do, sort of. Even if it’s not your choice to make.

     Your stepmother dumped you in the middle of a Pacific, surrounded by creatures that fly and beat their hooves, who lumber higher than trees and watch you from the undergrowth with rows of eyes and double sets of teeth. Their fur, their exoskeletons, their rippling, slimy scales are white as marble, speckled with gray. They stand out starkly against the dark jungle, so they learn how to creep and to hide. The first time you shot one down outside your tent, dark green oozed from both its maws.

     Not all of them are hostile. You’re fond of the little flying bulls, whose hooves are so delicate and who flit about your heads like dragonflies. Jake likes to grab at their tails, he likes the soft braying sounds they make, laughing so hard he begins to hiccup. You trapped one in a birdcage, and for a while now have been keeping it in his bedroom. He feeds it sticks of celery and shows it his favorite movies, which at the moment will be _Safety Last_ and _Hell Drivers._ It’s an easy distraction for him while you’re down in the laboratory, or deep within the temple.

  


     The temple is something you will have tried to avoid. Despite its prominence in the folders of color-coded plans and schema that Betty left you, the temple will not impress you at first. It crumbles in the center of your island’s crescent moon, algae and barnacles growing in thick colonies where the water laps its base.

     For several months you will not even be able to approach it, not through water nor by giant lily pad nor by the slick, wet stones that lead from the beach to its towering height. One of the island’s great winged reptiles, which you _refuse_ to refer to as dragons, had chosen its pinnacle as a nest for its egg. Each time it spotted you coming toward the temple, it beat its wings and spewed white-hot flames in your direction. When the egg hatched and the mother returned to her regular roost inside the volcano, you could undergo the first steps of your research.

     You have never been terribly fond of heights. There’s a unique terror that never quite goes away when you grip onto the handles of a helibot and have it haul you up into the entrance of the temple, you legs curled up beneath you, your arms aching from the effort it takes not to fall. In your rucksack today are a flashlight, a pack of batteries, a legal pad, a camera, five pens, and a tomato that you might eat for lunch if you make a breakthrough and decide to stay through the afternoon. The crumbling frog atop the spire stares at you blankly. The stone between its webbed toes is littered with the baby teeth of the reptile that hatched there weeks before.

     The purpose of your research is to translate the hieroglyphics inside the frog temple into a computer code that will hopefully form the backbone of something like a video game. The weight of the task intimidates you – you never had hands-on experience with the games that Skaianet produced, so you have no way of knowing whether your work is accurate. An impossible challenge, like when you had to piece together the shards of the china sugar bowl Halley pushed off the coffee table. You were a STEM student, not a linguistics nerd.

     From here, everything is dizzyingly small. The crooked stone spires that poke out of the water, the white haunches of the ungulate primates that herd around the tidal pools. Salty Pacific wind whips through your hair – panic pools in your gut when everything is in miniature. Hand trembling, you turn on your heel and grip onto the arched entryway for fear you’ll tumble over the ledge.

     You chip away at the temple like an English student trying to slog through _Ulysses_. Two steps –  jump over the weak stones that groan underfoot –  five steps, duck to dodge the tangles of hanging vegetation. Your flashlight will skim across the glyphs on the wall. Frogs carved deep into dark stone, lily pads and the roots of lotus flowers, rippling waves, webbed toes, clusters of tadpoles.

     Everything means something. The number of tadpoles in a line, the direction of their tails. The amount of petals on a lotus, the wiggling arches in the back of a salamander. You have a rudimentary dictionary that you’ve been writing and rewriting. Each new expedition throws a wrench in your translations, forces you to go back to the beginning and reassess. Your eyes, you fear, may be failing from the dim light.

     The dull spotlight of your torch will cast everything in flickering orange shadows. It finds the last sequence that you were able to record the day before –  three tadpoles in a triangle, a lily pad, turtle, turtle, frog, lotus, salamander, frog, frog. The lotuses, when carved one atop the other, seem to represent angle brackets, sectioning off chunks of code. Your hand traces a dusty spirograph, layers of dirt packed into its fractal joints. It leaves a smear of grime on your hand.

     Your cough echoes in the tight corridor, revealing the shortness of the ceiling concealed by darkness. Casting the flashlight about you, you see that ragged vines creep along just above you, growing into the grooves in the stone. You’re surprised to discover that the corridor stops just feet away from you, branching off suddenly into a sharply arched gateway. The skittering of pebbles can be heard, kicked across the floor by some rodent or dislodged by a lizard. The frog temple is teeming with such fauna, rats and newts and beetles that hide in the dark from the hungry, snapping maws of the alien beasts outside. Against your better judgement, you adjust your backpack strap and tread into the next room –  but not before marking your stopping point with a little white flag.

     The room you’ve discovered is disappointingly small, narrow and cramped with hardly a glyph written upon the walls. You knew it wouldn’t be big or grand – the temple is too narrow. Instead, a deep well in the center of the floor leads downward in a tight, spiraling staircase of which you can only see the first few steps. _This_ you’ve been expecting – when you would finally be going down.

     Taking a rock in your hand, you will pitch it down the steps and listen to the echoes as it bounces across stone, down and down until the little clatters stop coming. You aim your light into the deep dark, motes of dust drifting lazily in the yellow haze, and start to embark down the stairs. You will grip onto the creases in the brick, the fear of falling pattering in your chest.

     You will make it down only six steps before your boot slips on a chunk of broken rock. You tumble all the way down and land on your side in the room below, sharp pain radiating through your entire right side.

     “God _damn_ it, _fuck_ , that _hurt_ ,” you gasp. The helibots will have to build some sort of elevator for this temple, you’ve officially decided. Crumbling infrastructure plus hard-to-manage arthritis equals bruises you won’t be getting rid of for weeks.

     You roll to your knees and grip your ribs, trying to stand past pangs of pain. So much for the heavy backpack – it didn’t cushion you at all. Worthless thing. You shrug it off and steady yourself as you stand.

     There’s a soft clicking somewhere close by, like the analogue tick of a clock. Turning around, your shoulders still hunched with soreness, you will blink in surprise at the sight of a giant pink lotus flower, its petals folded up into a bud twice your size. Its pad rests on a stout but very wide pedestal, all four sides of it embedded with a screen flashing some sort of countdown: 0,000,000,000:10:11:04:13:14.

     You will count the sections backwards with your finger – seconds, hours, days, months, years. Whatever this thing has been counting down to, it started a long, long, _long_ time ago. It’s too nerve-wracking to reach up and touch the silky, fuchsia petals, if only to feel whether they’re real. You have no business interfering with this long waiting, millions of years in the making.

     The darkness lifts now as you blink it away. When you turn, you will come across another little surprise in the form of a big computer, hooked into the wall with an eldritch mass of thick cables and wires. The metal has rusted over time, more brown now than silver, its screen etched in hairline cracks. You experiment with the rotary knobs to its side, which cause a little white hash-mark to roam about on a world map that can scarcely be seen through the cracks. The only keyboard consists of two broad, blue buttons marked with fractal designs. You punch one of them, but it lights up red and gives you a dull two-tone noise of rejection. The screen reads “ADMINISTRATOR KEY REQUIRED.”

     Your eyes travel upward to another knob above the screen, one that toggles between “B1” and “B2.” A deep well runs through this dial, a chunky recess in the metal. You try to flip it to “B2,” but it won’t budge. The recess in the knob is the key you’re missing, then. Perhaps the last operator left it nearby. Curious, you snap a photo of the machine.

     If it needs a key after all, it isn’t anywhere on the pad just steps away, which you recognize as a transportalizer – an early-90s Skaianet venture that didn’t go far. You would be surprised how many people were afraid of leaving behind their arms and legs when teleporting from one floor to another. This transportalizer, though, is much older than anything your company was responsible for.

     Again, you look to the countdown beneath the giant lotus. You suddenly regret not investing more research into time travel – which, embarrassingly, seems to be the most obvious answer.

     There is another, much wider pit in the floor circled with green tiles. You will peer over its edge and see only a short fall, with two more transportalizers at its bottom. There’s no harm, you suppose, in checking to see whether the administrator key was set aside in some other room. And besides, you’re dying for a change in scenery. You take a running leap, feeling the air whip through your silver hair as you fall, and then you land feet first on a golden transportalizer. Everything tastes sour and metallic, your field of vision flashing green, and then you are not inside the frog temple anymore.

     The light is so bright that you stumble backwards off the pedestal and onto cool, smooth tiles. You land on your back – excellent. Dull pain makes your vision go fuzzy. Yellow and orange swirls above you as you blink at the ceiling. You catch the shape of a skylight, bright blue pouring inside the marble dome, but then the sight is obscured by curious faces looking down at you. They have smooth white skin, something like an exoskeleton, with blank, black beetle eyes staring at you. The beetle people! You feel the phantom grip of the man who frog marched you to half-drown in your stepmother’s pit of acid, and suddenly you scramble to your feet. There’s light gasping – a doll woman opens a paper fan and waves it before her face.

 

     “Are you quite all right, Miss?” comes a man’s voice.

     You turn to see that there are tall, burly beetle people approaching you, clothed in white and soft shades of gray. A couple of them are flitting their hands about their nightsticks – guards, then, or police officers.

     “I– yes, I, well –  where am I, exactly?”  
     “You’re in the White Queen’s palace,” pips a small woman wearing shades of pink and blue, a striped hennin draping gauzy veils about her shoulders. Her fingers as she fans herself are all ball-jointed.  
     “The Queen of what now?”  
     Her companion titters. A flouncy gown of light green and gold matches the circlet she wears on her hairless head. “The Queen of Prospit, stranger. This is the Golden Kingdom.”  
     “Perhaps you need direction.” One of the guards looks you up and down, and another Prospitian curiously picks a cobweb out of your hair. “The Queen will know what to do with you. Come along.”

     Panicked, you look about you, scanning for a way out. If you stomp very hard on the transportalizer, it may take you back to the temple – there’s no way of knowing, though, whether it works both ways. You may have to make a break through the Gothic arches. You could push over one of the tall, golden candelabras burning with colored candles, distract them as they’re stamping out the flames.

 _That won’t be necessary, Agent,_ comes a soft and lilting voice, one that worms its way into your head with looping curls like calligraphy. _You’ve done your duty. Now you may leave us._

 

     The doll people bow their heads and solemnly take their leave, pittering away with their shelled feet clacking against marble and tile. A hand rests on your shoulder, making you jump. Gazing up, you meet the eye of a doll woman wearing a crown of ivory, draped in swaths of flowing white. Edged with pearls and lace, her gown is tied into place like a Roman chiton. She holds a scepter shining white and blue, glimmering in hue and shifting in color like dazzling labradorite.

     “Pardon me,” you breathe. You are very aware of how dirty and dumpy you must look in comparison. “For intruding, I mean. I should… go.”  
_Nonsense, Witch. I’ve been waiting patiently for your visit._

     A twinge of a memory passes as quickly as it arrives. The Witch with the boy, the Witch with the dog. You have not been called a witch in many years, though you’ve been called a word that rhymes with it plenty enough through your life.

     “What did you call me?”

     The White Queen passes a chilly hand across your forehead, a soft and maternal gesture that abruptly envelops you in a deep feeling of calm. Your shoulders fall, your jaw stops clenching.

      _You’ve done so much for us already, and now you look after the young Page. The task of a Guardian is a difficult one, thankless and slotted for tragedy. Thank you for taking up the mantle, Jade._  
     “You know my name?”  
    _I remember all my heroes. My boasting Thieves and my Seers, my blustering Heirs and my elusive Bards. Whatever form you take, however many towers my moon should sprout, I remember your faces, I remember your stories. Welcome back, little Witch._

 

     Something painful blooms inside of you, a hollow thudding, like remembering you left behind something important, or that the cherished toy of your childhood can no longer be found, that perhaps it was lost years before without you ever noticing enough to mourn. The Witch with the boy, the boy who you lost, the boy who is not your brother, was never your brother, but was someone else. The Witch with the boy who she caught from the sky, the Witch who fled to the edge of the world. The dog, then, the dog, who was the Witch with the dog?

    _Jade, oh, my Witch, why do you weep? There is still so much for you to do, so much that will continue on because of your work. You always did think ahead._  
     “I don’t understand,” you murmur through the tracks of tears that stain your face. You don’t know when they started, or why, and you will not move to wipe them away.  
    _It’s painful to remember, isn’t it? I understand all too well._

     She guides you by the shoulder across the shining floor. Polished tiles are etched with the shapes of lotus flowers. The White Queen rests her hand on the small of your back and gestures to the mural along the wall, which spans nearly the entire circumference of the throne room. The smell of incense flickers in your nose as you take in the painting that sprawls along the stone.

     Prospit, golden and gleaming, basks in the warm blue light of Skaia, its clouds ripe with visions of the future. Burning battlefields and new, exciting planets, grand skeletal beasts and writhing serpents. Its chain extends to the black of the Incipisphere, two shining towers where the two children dream inside.

     The girl in the painting floats in a grand, golden gown with the crescent moon of Prospit shining on her chest. Her eyes are bright turquoise; a lotus blooms in her cupped hands. She offers it to the boy beneath her, with dark green eyes that match the skin of the frog that rests, content, in his palm. Painted in broad, Impressionistic strokes, the boy and the girl smile serenely, flowers clustered in their hair and about their feet in pinks and blues and greens. Dreaming can wait, the towers will still be standing when they grow weary –  but now it is time to revel in the Golden Kingdom. The Maid and the Page have an entire moon to explore.

     How you long to feel it again, Prospit under your feet, the freedom of drifting, weightless, through the streets. Your Prospitian friends, tea with the Queen in her flower garden, guarding the Heir as you waited for him to wake. The infuriating waiting, the burn of impatience, how deeply you wished for John to open his eyes and join you on this moon where you were heroes and you were beloved and meant for a greater purpose. Waiting for John, who would take you away from the island where no life grew and no animals played because he had torn down all the trees and shot all the animals, the blasted old man, and all you had in the entire world was your best friend, your dog–

     “Oh!” You cover your mouth and begin to cry harder than ever.  
_There, there, my dear. I’m here._

 

     It all swirls around inside your head, playing bumper cars with your other memories, wrestling for control. You remember meteors raining down upon the ocean, how the waves rippled when they collided, you remember flowers and the fireplace and a doll with blue hair, you remember the thing called Space and how it yawned inside of you like a secret.

     And then the sharpness of the smell, the sights, the bright gold and the feeling of floating – it feels like a quickly fading dream. You grasp at the abstract shapes of it, snatching at smoke and shadow, but it’s already slipping through your fingers. But you remember the Heir in the other tower, a face you could never forget.

     “My Jake is a Page, then,” you shudder as you wipe away your tears. “Imagine that.”  
      _The Page of Hope. He has great potential, but a long road ahead of him. Pages contain unfathomable power once they are able to harness it. He’s fortunate to have the Guardian he does._  
     “I don’t want him to play the game,” you’ll gasp. “Not after everything we did. Why does he have to do it again?”  
      _You don’t remember, then, the sacrifice your teammates made to see victory. If not now, give it time. You did a very brave thing and made a very hard decision. With any luck, the Page will be there to reap the rewards._  
     “If I’m writing the code for this game, I can’t continue.” You shake your head. “It will destroy everything, _everything_ anyone has ever worked for. Nothing will be left.”  
    _Oh, there is always something left. My brave and darling Jade, little Witch, starshine, I know you’ll make the right choice._

     Her jaw clicks as she speaks, and each time she closes her mouth the two halves of her jaw fit perfectly together like puzzle pieces. It gives her face a smooth, unblemished look. The White Queen rests her chin atop your head as you sniffle. You will be very embarrassed at yourself for your tantrum.

     “I can’t even translate the glyphs,” you protest.  
_All you needed to do was ask for help,_ she laughs softly. _The frog temple was not originally crafted by our people, but we had a hand in its propogation. Its language is our language. There are many books I could lend you. The library can spare them._

     Outside, a belltower begins to count the hour. There’s the sound of carriage wheels rattling against cobblestone, laughter from a corridor. Carapacians amble by in doublets and cloaks, ruffs and tippets and billowing sleeves.

     “Your Majesty, if I may,” you ask cautiously, “I think I’d like to see my grandson.”

  
  


     Jake sleeps with his mouth hanging open, snoring softly in his Prospitian bedroom. How much cleaner it is than his room at room, you’ll think. Servants have picked up the piles of toys that seem to scatter themselves everywhere even after you’ve just tidied up, set away in baskets and organized neatly. The cage in which his winged bull lives is empty and standing open, shining gold and sitting atop a tidy stack of alphabet board books. The gauzy green curtains are tied with ribbons, letting bright Skaialight coast in and bathe the room.

     From his window you can see the curvature of Skaia, the clouds drifting across the sky. Taking a moment to look out, you can see the shadows of a four-eyed cat and a birthday cake in a cumulus cloud trundling by.

     You have elected not to disturb the Maid in the other tower. She is not your child. It wouldn’t be right.

     “What is it like, to have the memories of all those players in your head?” you ask the White Queen. She sits at the edge of Jake’s bed, her delicate hands folded in her lap. “Is it hard to keep us all apart?”  
     She toys with the golden ring on her pointer finger, turning it ‘round and ‘round. _It would be difficult to explain to someone who did not sprout from Skaia fully formed. The memories do not compete with one another, no. They are more akin to separate files in a cabinet through which I may peruse._ She pauses to smooth out a wrinkle in Jake’s bedsheet. If you ever decide to delve into your memories, Witch, I am happy to oblige.  
     “I don’t think that would be a good idea. It feels like escapism. I can’t go traipsing about reliving the past.” You curl your hair around your finger. “It barely feels real, anyway. But _right_ at the same time. It’s very confusing.”  
 _Understandable._

     Down below, past the bronze chain that tethers this satellite to Prospit proper, you can make out the little streams of water flowing between bridges and cathedrals. You have a vague, abstract memory of sitting in a gondola as a Prospitian rowed you underneath the arched bridges, gazing up at the sparkling blue of Skaia with your arms folded beneath your head.

     Jake tosses in his sleep. His glasses are knocked askew as he presses his cheek to the pillow, his little eyebrows crumpling. You stand from your window perch to kneel beside him, softly stroking his hair. The creases in his forehead ease, and he mumbles something nonsensical before flopping over again.

 _Tell me about the Page, Jade. What is he like when he wakes?_  
     “He’s a rambunctious little runt,” you say with a smile, still looking down at him. You tuck his blanket under his chin. “Loves animals and movies. He’s allergic to peanuts, like his great-uncle was. I’m a little worried about how long it’s taking him to speak in full sentences. I guess he’s just a late bloomer.”   
      _At his age, I could not get you to stop talking. You had something to say about everything._  
     You laugh. “He’s a curious one, but he uses his hands more than his words. We find our own way to communicate.”  
    _A mother finds her way, yes. You thought I was your mother, when you were very small._

     Your cheeks burn. Flustered, you will change the subject.

     “What of Derse, then? Am I remembering correctly? It’s called ‘Derse,’ right?”  
     The White Queen’s eyes narrow in his approximation of an amused smile. _Derse still stands, out in the edges of the Veil. Unfortunately, it is quite different now from the one you remember._  
     “In what way?”  
_The Black King and the Black Queen have been lost._ Pensive, the White Queen traces her jointed finger along her sharp jaw. _A woman from the other side subjugated them. They fought her and were killed. The woman, I hear, posted their heads on pikes._  
     A dark shiver runs down your back. “Where did the woman come from?”  
      _From space, she told them. With any luck I will never meet her. The Dersites respected the Black Queen, but they never quite feared her. The case is much different with this one. They call her their Imperious Condescension._  
     Your body feels very, very cold. “What an unusual name.”  
    _Yes. I believe she is quite used to having a kingdom to rule over, being as ruthless and heavy-handed as she is. She watches over the Dersites in her Cubicle of Vigilance._  
     “Which is what?”  
      _A quartet of fenestrated planes through which she can observe the actions and whereabouts of her subjects. By entering the glass of a plane, one can transport oneself to the location being surveilled. Prospit does not take part in the use of fenestrated planes, however. I find them invasive and overbearing._  
“Like a transportalizer?”  
 _Not unlike it, yes._

     You trace your bottom lip with your thumb. The ghostly impressions you have of the Obsidian Kingdom are dark and unpleasant. They didn’t like you very much. However much they irritated you, however much they tried to make your dreaming life harder, the Dersites were never evil. They don’t deserve a Condescension. And maybe you can’t give them their Queen back, or restore things to the way they used to be, but at the very least you can be a thorn in your stepmother’s side.

     “Your Majesty, thank you very much for your time today. I’m sorry if I interrupted anything,” you say, standing and brushing yourself off. “I’ll be leaving now.”  
     The White Queen cocks her head. _If you insist. Do feel free to return whenever you wish, Jade. May I have an Agent escort you to the transportalizer?_  
     “Thank you for the offer, but no, thank you. I think I’ll do some adventuring of my own before I return home. Though, while I’m at it,” you mumble, reaching for the camera on your belt loop, “do you happen to know what this apparatus is?”  
     The White Queen blinks at the dark photo you took of the thing with the blue buttons. _Of course. That is a transmaterializer, meant to exchange objects through dimensional planes. It looks as though you need a key._

     Your heart leaps as she pulls out a chunky thing like a spirograph, thick and heavy as lead. You take it from her with both hands, clasping it tightly to you.

 _You will find the directions are rather straightforward. Forgive me if it doesn’t work on the first try, however. There’s no telling whether it has any uranium left to fuel a transaction._ The White Queen pats your cheek affectionately, then walks to the staircase that leads to the bottom of the dream tower. _Have fun with your adventure, Witch. Take care not to make an attempt at flight – only dreamers can do that._

     The sound of her clicking feet disappears down the stairs, and you’re alone again. Clutching the spirograph key, you will give Jake a soft kiss on his cheek. Your grandson mutters something, clenching and unclenching his fists.

     “I’ll be home shortly, pet,” you whisper. “Grandma has to steal something right quick.”

  
  


     Derse is dark, darker than you imagined, all shadowy alleyways and towers that stretch so far into the sky that they fade to black at their summits. You wander the dim streets in anonymity, draped in velvety violet, your head bowed beneath a black theatre mask. Others do not look at you. They look to the ground, they cluster in tight groups. The terror of the new reign is still fresh. They don’t care about the tall stranger in the odd rags.

     The Prospitian ticket-seller at King’s Square Station gave you step-by-step directions to the former Black Queen’s administrative offices. Very upbeat, she was, and a little too helpful. She took care to tell you that as you pass the corner of Bishop’s Terrace and Triforium Alley, you might pass a knocked-over trash bin, and should mind your step.

     A Dersite wearing a pinstripe suit smokes against the pier of a cathedral. He blows a ring of odorous purple smoke in your direction. You will bustle along and dart down a tight alleyway, where a stout carapacian half your size promised the location of a secret staff entrance – a tidbit of information you paid for by giving him the Swiss army knife in your pocket.

     Inside the offices, you end up hogtying two Dersites together and locking them in a supply closet to stop them from hollering your presence. Your steps are muted by Persian rugs woven in deep indigos and lavenders, the smell of tobacco always lingering somewhere. You hide behind urns and behind leather armchairs as you wait for carapacians to pass by. They dress oldschool here, you’ve noticed – the way your coworkers did when you were still a secretary in Pittsburgh. You sneak past a Dersite whose pearl necklace clacks against the filing cabinet she leans over.

     Before you taped the mouths shut of the blabber-mouthed Dersites in the supply closet, they told you where to find the Cubicle of Vigilance. Now you stand outside its door. “NOIR, JACK. ARCHAGENT.” it reads in bold, embossed letters. You jimmy the lock and force your way inside.

     It’s a lavish office, with a high, vaulted ceiling and ornate crown molding. Piles of unorganized folders lie on a desk nearby, books left open on the floor, notepads full of citations and violation notices yet to be filled out. The soft sound of an audio recording can be heard from the glowing panes. You lift your mask off and set it aside to approach the fenestrated planes. What they display is mundane – an empty line of prison cells, the outside of a bank vault, two Dersites playing a card game in a courtyard, a room of newspaper journalists tapping away at typewriters. You use both arms and all your body weight to wobble one of them backward and forward; as you expect, it isn’t hooked into anything at all. No outlets, no plugs. They really are windows to anywhere, then.

     You think you’d like very much to have one of these gadgets for your laboratory.

     Taking out your infinitesimalator, a little pen-shaped thing you slipped into your side pocket –  you know, for when you have to shrink things on the go – you aim its spotlight on the fourth wall and shrink it down to the size of a moleskin journal. You’re about to tuck it into your velvet robes when clicking footsteps sound from the lounge next door. You will freeze when you hear a voice, deep and gravelly and deeply unpleasant.

     “And tell the Archagent he can bite my rock-hard candy a– hey!”

     You stare at Archagent Jack Noir. Archagent Jack Noir stares back at you.

     “Hey, old broad!” he snaps, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

     He snaps out a pocket knife and starts to point it at you. Before he can take another step toward you, you lunge forward and punch him hard in the jaw. Jack topples over, rock-hard candy ass thudding to the carpet.

     “I’m jackin’ your shit, that’s what I’m doing!” you laugh. You nestle the fourth wall under your arm and summon your pistol from your strife specibus, keeping it trained on Jack as you back out of the office. “And there ain’t a damn thing you can do about it!”  
     “That’s Royal property!”  
     “Not anymore! Later days, jackass!”

     You leap from the office window feeling happier than you’ve felt in a long, long time.

  
  
  


     On the way out of the frog temple, you cannot help but try out the transmaterializer. Setting aside the fourth wall and the book of comprehensive carapacian heiroglyphy that the White Queen lent you with your new library card, you push the spirograph key into the rotary dial. The whole apparatus lights up, wires chugging and servers heating up and screens flashing haywire. When the machine settles down and blinks green with approval, you click the dial to “B1.”

     The hash-mark blinks white in the dead center of the map, displaying nothing but open ocean on a secondary screen. You will twist the rotary dials carefully, training them on the spot in the ocean where you know you are currently. The computer lags as it tries to catch up with your change in coordinates. Finally it focuses on the crescent shape of your island, with its tower and its monstrous volcano and the frog temple in which you are now. But this island is different. You squint hard and look closer. This island has no jungle. Just broad expanses of hills.

     You zoom in closer, your nose an inch from the screen, trying to discern the images through the many cracks. The transmaterializer allows you to peer into the house itself, past the glass walls of the greenhouse.

     “This is not my tower,” you murmur.

     There are rows of tomato plants, yes, and some geraniums too, but there are also busy rows of jam-packed fruits and vegetables, vibrant flowers and stacks of terracotta flower pots. You are looking hard at a line of beanstalks when a little girl pokes up from where she was stooped behind a table.

     You jump and back away from the screen at the sight of her, this girl you’ve walked in on. You feel like an intruder. The little gardener has a mane of wild black curls that frame her face like a halo, dirt smudged on her rolled-up sleeves. She adjusts an apron and picks up a watering can, which she uses to water the beanstalks. Dark skin and a flurry of freckles, all dimples and wide spectacles. You know this girl. This girl is you.

     “Oh, hello there, little Witch,” you whisper to the screen.

     There’s a pause as Jade, not-you Jade, doppelganger, the witch with the dog, stops to wipe her forehead. Her eyes flicker to the screen, she almost seems to smile at you, and then she goes back to work.

     How much easier it would be to be her again.

     “You’re such a lucky girl,” you sigh. “Sorry about this.”

     The hash-mark travels somewhere in her vegetable patch. You press a broad, blue button, which costs you every bit of uranium left inside the fuel tank. The machine whirs, coughing from so many years of disuse, and finally appearifies a pumpkin.

  
  
  
  


     “My Jacob, light of my life, starshine, my little Hope!” you sing as you waltz into the kitchen, dumping your backpack on the floor.

     Jake smiles at you in that big, dopey way, grasping for you as his little winged pet flits about, braying and snorting. You scoop up your grandson and give him a big smacking kiss on the cheek.

     “What adventures I’ve had today, little one, ones you could scarcely believe!”

     Jake babbles his approximation of ‘frog temple,’ which normally would concern you because he has such a hard time with pronunciation and he still won’t speak in complete sentences, but now it is only endearing. You give him a rapidfire line of kisses to the forehead. 

     “Yes, my love, what wonderful things I found. Treasures of Kings and Queens, Jacob, priceless gold and all other sorts of fantastica. And look!”

     You set him down and open a bundle to reveal the great big pumpkin you appearified from your other self. It’s bigger than Jake is, ripe and orange with nary a scratch or rotten patch.

     “What is?” Jake asks.  
     “It’s a pumpkin, starshine! Pump-kin,” you say, over-enunciating.  
     “Punkin,” he laughs.  
     “Good effort, my love. Pumpkins can be used to make pumpkin pie, which is very sweet and tasty. Would you like Grandma to bake you a pumpkin pie, sweet boy?”

     Your grandson nods enthusiastically. His pet nibbles at the leafy stem of the gourd, and you swat him away. Betty was never a pie-baker, she thought it a lesser dessert, far inferior to cake, and you’ve never had a taste for it, either. But you’re determined to keep riding this high, this incredible adrenaline. You extract the skulltop from your specibus and put it on, opening up a rudimentary Internet browser you’ve been coding that you’ve tentatively christened Echidna.

     “Your grandmother has never done this before, Jacob, so be patient with me,” you mumble as you take the pots and pans from under the counter. “I’ll have you help me with the crust, how about that?”

     Internet pop-up windows clutter your vision. You whisk them away and use the blinking of your eyelids to scroll down a recipe for pumpkin pie. You will have to scroll past three paragraphs of melancholic longing for the Rhode Island beach house of the author’s childhood.

     “Jake, have I ever told you how brave you are? So tough, tough as nails, you are. I wasn’t like that when I was younger. I cried a lot, you know. The thing you have to understand, Jacob, is that tears never get you anywhere.”

     Past the Echidna windows, you can’t even tell if Jake is listening to you. You rip off a sheet of parchment paper and turn a knob to preheat the oven.

     “Or they would, maybe, if you had a normal mother. That’s what I regret, little one, more than anything. You can’t control who you end up with, or what they’ll be like, or what they’ll do to you. But you can try your damndest not to let them drag you down with them.” You pause in the middle of hacking your pumpkin in half. “Perhaps I should have cried more. John cried much more than I did, and look where he ended up.”

     Jake grabs his pet from midair and squeezes it to him.

     “Let him go, Jacob, he doesn’t want to play.”

     He releases the bull and lets it flit into the rafters of the ceiling. He’s gotten fur on his shirt, now, which you’ll have to dust off of him. He has dozens of this shirt, little Skaianet souvenirs that were once given away for a Boy Scouts overnight event in New York. They’ll last him til he’s grown.

     “Come up here, Jake.” You pat the counter and jerk your head to beckon him to you. “I’ll teach you how to make a pie crust.”

     Jake nestles between your arms, standing on his tiptoes even though you’ve set him atop a barstool. He sneezes when he gets flour all over his face, his whole face dusted with the stuff. You laugh so hard that you cry before you take a wet paper towel and wipe it off of him. When the dough is kneaded into a thin, fine crust, Jake helps you line the pan with it. You guide his hand as he presses the fork into the edges, crimping the crust. It turns out very uneven, not pretty at all, but that’s okay. It wasn’t what you were going for, anyway.

     As you wait for the pie to bake, you sit with him on your lap and watch the shrunken screen of the fenestrated window. You will have to toggle the little dials on the back to watch something other than the minutiae of Dersite administrative duties, and ultimately you’re able to focus it on the interior of the jungle outside. Jake babbles at the screen and pats the glass with his grubby palms.

     “Yes, a mountain lion in the bush, do you see it? Such a fierce fellow.” You fake a ferocious roar, chomping your teeth at him. Jake laughs. “That’s why we stay in here, little one. To keep the beasties and the hobgoblins away.”

     You plant a kiss atop his head, and a phantom shudder of fear passes through you when you smell the sweet scent of sugar and cinnamon in his hair. The smell of dessert, of setting the table and her swirling champagne glass. The frosting on her long, painted nails. You’re so frightened that for a moment you cannot move.

     Then Jake reaches up and pats your cheek, gazing up at you with that sweet little crooked smile, all those baby teeth that you’ll have to reward with quarters under his pillows. Your shoulders relax, the moment passes, the fear evaporates. You rest your cheek on Jake’s head and hold him tight to you.

 

     You cannot wait to watch your Page of Hope grow up.


	22. 1999

     You will be eighty-nine when you finish the code for SBURB.

 

     For several minutes you will just stare at the color-coded text on your screen. The laboratory is dark. Your computer casts a white glow on the keyboard, on the chilly mug of twice-reheated coffee in your hands, on your beaten 1997 paperback edition of _Computer Science for Assholes._ By now your desktop is littered with half-finished and thrice-revised shortcuts for versions of SBURB that didn’t pan out –  dec98vers.dis*, newfrogtranslation.^cake, fuckingdumbvers.dis*, prospitsyllabary.^cake, gfdkfjgh.dis*, sburburburburb.~ath. You don’t have a team of underlings checking and re-checking your work, so you don’t really care about presentable file names anymore.

     Come to think of it, “finish” is a self-confident way of phrasing it. You don’t have a way of running it, not in a way that matters, so the client and server codes that are now being transferred to flash drives are more of an “educated guess.” The White Queen’s syllabaries have been immensely helpful –  better than anything you could have done on your own – but you’re not a coder, and you’re not a programmer. It’s merely the best you could do. But pretty goddamn close, if you’re feeling generous.

     You will not know what will happen to this code when it makes its way to Minneapolis, or Vermont, or wherever Betty has cast her shadow. Run through a simulator, maybe, cleaned up, given a pretty red interface and pretty red packaging. Stored somewhere in a warehouse, when your little one is grown and can actually use a computer. And then nothing much will matter after that. Your island will be gone, your first office in Pittsburgh – if it hasn’t been knocked down. The rowhouse you lived in in Boston, even the Crocker house in Washington. Everything will burn, swept away by cosmic ash and kinetic energy, it will blacken and char and then nothing you do or have done or have ever accomplished will count for diddly squat. You sort of wonder what the point is of being here at all.

     That’s your best case scenario, anyway. Perhaps you’ve managed to patch out the pesky game function that causes meteors to drop from the sky.

 

     In any case it won’t matter for Betty. The Baroness will pack up her bag when things go south. She’ll fluff out her hair and apply her lipstick and then she’ll be on her ship to the next planet, or the next obsidian moon. Billions will die, but not your stepmother. Consequences have never applied to her.

     There’s the rhythmic _cack-cack-cack_ ing of a bird somewhere outside. Its call abruptly ends – startled out of its perch, or eaten by a marble-white double-mawed jungle cat.

     As you watch the loading bar crawl across your page, you will rip your flash drive from its port and start tacking at the keys.

     It starts with ripping a few lines of code from the middle, Ctrl-X-X-X-Xing away chunks of text. You cut out a smear of infrastructure responsible for achieving grist bevels or loading docket pumps –  one of the two, who cares which – and paste it again towards the top. You will go on like this for twenty minutes or more, rearranging characters, removing brackets, wiping out sections and replacing them with gobbledygook from your Echidna source code. You will polish the whole thing off with a little code you made for fun when you were learning the ropes – a line that, when opened on another PC, will prompt a pop-up window to blip onto the screen, depicting a simple 8-bit middle finger. Harmless fun –  for you, that is. Then you save the file as SBURBalphafinal99.~ath and load it onto your flash drive.

     If you thought that any of this would make a difference down the road, you wouldn’t have done it. If Jake does not play SBURB he will die here, alone in obscurity, and the meteors of some other session will chip away at the planet until nothing is left, not even him. From what you remember, anyway –  the heat wave that exploded your windows, the dance of glass across the floor, how the final meteor blotted out the stars, a cloud of black ringed with fire. You can begrudgingly accept, then, that this code must make its journey to the mainland, that it will be patented and printed and packaged.

     You’re suddenly reminded of a woman at the Bell of Pennsylvania who confided in you as you refilled her coffee mug that she did things incorrectly on purpose so her boss wouldn’t give her new responsibilities. Someone will have to clean up the mess you’ve made of the code, and you have no idea how long it will take them to do so. Jade, 1. Betty, 0. Even if for a short time.

     The thought of this will cheer you up a little, and a reason to smile about anything is a rare commodity these days. You are still in your bathrobe at eight p.m., your hair piled atop your head with a cord that was holding some wires together. The Nuclear Knockout judging panel eats their hearts out.

     When the code is finished transferring, you place its drive into a bubble envelope. Later, a helibot will place it into the cargo plane that passes Hellmurder Island once every five and a half months.

     There is a knocking at the door. You will hear the sound of the pass code beeping from the fingerprint scanner you installed two feet off the ground so Jake could reach it with his grubby little palms. The door cracks open.

     “Gramma,” he murmurs. “You promised.”

     Every word more than one syllable draws a sigh of relief out of you. He’s finally starting to talk, bit by cautious bit.

     “That I did, my dearest darling.” You stand –  knees creaking painfully – and you wince at the arthritic pain as you brush yourself off. “And Grandma never breaks her promises. Come along, now. You remember how to operate the telescope, yes?”  
     “Yeah!”

     Jake bounces up and down on the soles of his feet. He has only somewhat successfully changed himself into his pajamas – two or three buttons are fastened in the wrong places. You would stoop to adjust them, but you would like him to become a little more self-sufficient. That, and your joints hurt too much to stoop.

     You ruffle his fluffy black hair and take his hand. The laboratory door locks behind you.

     “Let’s be off, then.”

  
  
  


     The island is chilly at night.

     Salty air will dance through your hair up on the balcony, the highest point in the tower where everything looks blurry and insignificant. You gently guide Jake’s hand as he adjusts the telescope, staring into it with his little mouth agape. He stays in your lap like this, the two of you keeping each other warm.

     Out in the water, a great white back breaches the surface, thrashes, and disappears. You can make out the tail slapping the water, the warbling gurgle-bleat of the seagoat that stalks the ocean. Its territory extends at least ten miles from the shore, where it hunts the whale sharks and the great whites. You have also seen it rear its head to snap seagulls out of the sky. When food is scarce and the seagoat grows restless, it slithers to shore like a squirming eel, using the muscles of its front hooves to tread the land and drag away screaming beasts to drown. Squinting hard, you can make out the ivory tips of its horns poking out of the sea like a pair of snorkels.

     All the constellations you ever saw in America – Orion hovering above your house in the early morning, the pinprick of Venus as you drove to your office – they’re upside down or disappeared. The stars have been overturned, rattled about in a box and left to scatter in this strange and unfamiliar hemisphere. The Alpha Centauri triplets will burn bright in unison tonight, Hydra and Libra twisting out into the black. Polaris, lost and confused, is nowhere to be found.

     “Look at Corvus, my love, you can see his four points.”

     Jake lifts his gaze when you redirect the point of his telescope. Together you point out Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, and Beta.

     “Do you remember Corvus, Jake? Tell me what he is, I seem to have forgotten.”  
     “He’s a bird!”  
     “Oh yes, silly me, of course. Corvus the raven. Look at him perched upon Hydra’s back, begrudging partners out there in the blackness. Apollo launched them into the sky at escape velocity, flinging them among the stars to fester. What is escape velocity, my sweet?”  
     “Eleven point one kilometers per, uh… seconds.”  
     “Eleven point one eighty-six, dearest. Kilometers per second. But you were close enough.”  
     “Can you tell the story again?”  
     “Which one? I tell you much too many.”  
     “The one about all the stars.”  
     “Oh, of course, I don’t know why I even asked. You can’t get enough of that one, can you?”

     Jake will set down the telescope and you hold it across his lap, crossing your ankles as he makes himself comfortable. He grasps onto the sleeves of your robe, pulling your arms closer around him like a blanket. You lean your head back and blink lazily up at the sky, the smattering of stars unlike anything you’ve ever seen. The sky is so pure here, unpolluted, untouched by humans. You will feel as though you could make out the dark, inky colors of some distant nebula.

     “Before there was anything, before there was water in the ocean and before the sun rose and set across the sky, there was nothing at all. Everything was black and empty, a giant and lonely room where no one lived because no one had been thought of yet. In the middle of the vast loneliness, the big black yawning void, there was a tiny little blip of starshine impossibly heavy. Too hot to touch and too heavy to lift, it burned alone because there was nothing else in the universe, nothing but the dense little star. And because everything else was nothing, the star had no way of knowing it was ‘something.’

     “The star had been born just a fraction of a fraction of a second ago, a much, much longer time than anything had ever lasted – because time hadn’t been thought of yet, and anything was actually nothing. And that fraction of a fraction of a second was so unbearably lonely and sad, the weight of its sadness wrenched the star apart. It decided it was too lonesome to be the only thing in the big and yawning void, and so it tore itself into a billion trillion quadrillion pieces called….”

     “Atoms!”

     “Atoms, yes, my love! The atoms flew apart from each other, launching across the heavens with blazing white-hot tails. And now the void was lit up from the inside, gases becoming dense and pulling together into nebulas, nebulas into new stars. Specks of dirt became meteors and comets, and the heavy gravity of them all pressed and molded some of the most special atoms into planets and moons. And so the universe was born from such a little speck, who was so alone that it decided it would become its own ‘something,’ its own universe, its own family and its own friends.

     “But the star hadn’t thought things through at all – it had reached its decision in a moment quicker than it takes for our hearts to beat. It was not the only thing in the universe anymore, no, but rather countless separate things flung to the far corners of the void. And because it had split itself apart so forcefully, the pieces launched themselves very, very far apart from each other. So fast that they continue whirling about space even now. In its quest to become something, to have friends with which to share its life, the little star became lonelier than ever. Once a whole and complete little thing, it was now shattered into so many pieces that it couldn’t ever be put back together.

     “And the atoms, even now, continue to crawl away from each other. One day, all the pieces of the little star will be so far away from one another that gravity will cease to pull on anything at all. So each lonely thing will hang forever in space, as alone as they were to begin with.”

     Jake yawns and rests his cheek against you. You run your fingers through his soft hair, listening to his breathing as it begins to slow. It isn’t so much the content of the story that he likes as it is the length of it. He likes to listen to the thrumming bass of your voice, how it drawls when you’re as tired as he is. You are not even sure he understands what the story means.

     “But it’s not all bad. Gravity pulls us together like a giant hug, tugging pieces together. Like the little star is trying to make itself whole again. Which is why, when we fall, we get pulled to the earth. We shouldn’t be upset or sad – it’s just the universe trying to fix all of its broken pieces. It’s the lonely star giving us all a hug.”

     With this, you give Jake a hug of your own. When you look down at him, you’ll see that your grandson has already fallen asleep. Gingerly, you take the glasses off his face and tuck them into your pocket.

     The chittering of animals down in the jungle and the rhythm of water lapping the cliffs – you let it reset your mind as you look up at the upside-down constellations. Just counting your inhales and exhales, willing your pulse to reach a happy medium.

     When was the last time you ever saw something so black? Perhaps it was the Furthest Ring, the writhing black at the edges of the Incipisphere, far past the glow of Skaialight. The black with no depth to it, without shadow or reflection, terrible in its perfection. The clouds were always better, you thought. Clouds didn’t lie. Clouds didn’t chirp and sing their horrible warble-songs into the black.

  
  


     “I don’t think I understand what it means to be a hero of Space.”  
_What is there to understand?_

     The White Queen’s cup clinks into its saucer. A handmaid draped in gauzy gold places a sugar bowl before you, dipping her head and retreating to the wall of the rooftop garden.

     From where you sit among the flowers, you can see Prospit’s horizon, its gilded cathedrals and the angles of its clock towers. The bronze chain holding its moon in orbit is hazy through the low-hanging clouds of Skaia. In the billowing fluff of a cumulonimbus, you see a tower surrounded by water, a little black kitten trying to crawl atop a pumpkin.

     “Each aspect _means_ something. It speaks to something only you can do… I think. Something that’s an integral part of you.”  
_That is one interpretation. Though, you mustn’t forget that what we are discussing are the infrastructural parts of a game. Gears inside a clock, a chip in a computer. Take for example a game of cards, which possesses a King, a Queen, an Ace, even a Joker. All such figures serve a role and mean something unique. Knowing that meaning and playing to it is part of winning the game. The mythological role you possess is a part of you, yes, and for many heroes it may form a core part of their being. It’s true that some take their role very seriously. But for others, one’s class and aspect are merely a mechanic that may be manipulated to win the game.  
_     “Is it wrong, then? To take it seriously, that is.”

     A shuttle rises out of the planet’s depths and leaves a trail of smoke on its way to its destination – a Dersite shuttle station, or some rock out in the Veil.

      _Not at all. To embody one’s role in the mythos is to understand what lies in your very heart. To truly be in tune with it is to be in tune with yourself._  
     You will stir your tea nervously, watching the lump of sugar break apart and disappear. “Hm.”  
      _It isn’t foolish to spend time thinking on it, Jade. You may not be a player anymore, but you were, once. Somewhere, not far from us at all, you are still playing. The Witch of Space is blazing trails out there, embracing her role. Becoming one with it._  
     “Which brings us back to my original question.”  
     The White Queen laughs. _Yes, what is Space indeed? Well, I will return your query with one of my own. What do you think of when you think of Space?_

     You sip your tea quietly and look out over Prospit. The deep black hanging over the gilded surface, the emptiness that lies beyond the comfort. How cold it is when you leave the rich warmth of Skaia.

     “Atoms being pushed away from one another, the universe expanding. How you could travel for years without reaching a single star, the… vast emptiness between every single thing. How even our cells are made mostly of vacuum.” You clasp your fingers around the cup, letting the warmth ease your sore joints. “Loneliness.”  
_For some._ The White Queen tilts her chin. _Space is essential to any session that hopes to succeed. The children of Space create – they innovate, they inspire. More literally than figuratively. Those of Space are tasked with the creation of new life. Birth among the ashes of the dead host planet._  
     “Space is a mother.”  
_A mother will do whatever is best for her children._ She crosses her legs. _And at the same time, Space is passive. If life is a play, then let Space be the stage. It allows others to play active roles._  
     “That is, Space is responsible for the creation of something that others are meant to enjoy.”  
    _It seems as though you already have a preconceived notion._  
     “You could say that.”  
      _It’s true that the mantle of Space inherits a great deal of responsibility. Some heroes find this hard to grapple with. It engenders the sentiment that they are pulling more than their fair share, that others are benefitting from the fruit of their labors without having contributed to it. I understand the reasoning, despite disagreeing with it. Space can be a very fulfilling aspect to possess. Its potential for greatness is immeasurable._

     The Queen allows a handmaid to refill her cup. She spoons two cubes of sugar into it.

_Of course, I am rather biased. The heroes of Space tend to fall under my care._

     You will consider this, staring into the rippling reflection of Skaia in your tea.

     Space, the great vacuum, gravity pushing everything away. The moon’s pull on the tides – stay close, but get away, come closer, now leave me alone. How Space has crept into you, become a part and nestled there. Space, launching you at escape velocity from your childhood home. Space, the expanse of dark matter between you and John. Space, which has pulled at your puppet strings, wedged light-years between you and everyone who has ever come to care for you. Laika the space dog, pawing at the rocket door, flung into space to hang there. Laika whimpering in the cold and the dark, Laika floating in zero gravity. You remember watching the Soviets blast her into the sky when it happened. It made you want to weep.

     “We carry a heavy burden,” you say after a long pause. “Does anyone understand?”  
_It’s difficult to conceptualize the journey that another’s aspect takes them on. You would find it challenging to sympathize with one of the Doom-bound, or a hero of Rage. But it is hard, yes. It’s hard to understand the path of a hero of Space. It’s hard, and few can understand._

     You rest your eyes for a moment. When you blink up at the Queen, she’s looking at you with that soft, maternal look.

     “As if I needed Space to know that about myself,” you will try to laugh it off. It’s a pained smile you give her, and it sort of annoys you how plainly she can see through it. “So, Space is one thing. What about a Witch? Does that… change anything for me?”  
_A Witch of Space, my love, is a force of nature. They may rip apart a universe or put it back together –  the choice is theirs._

     There’s a vague stir of a memory that makes your fingers twitch – the feeling of a slimy amphibian leaping out of your hands, wet and cold from the ice it had been trapped inside of. The heat of magma running under the earth, the snowflakes that collected on your eyelashes. When you get this feeling, otherworldly and out of body, you feel like you’re ghosting just outside the boundaries of your body. You pinch your hand, and reality comes back, like you’ve been yanked from the sky and plopped back into your chair. Maybe not “reality,” though, but just the present. The now.

     “Does this session have a hero of Space?”  
     A dark look crosses the Queen’s face. She narrows her black eyes, her long eyelashes batting as she looks away from you and over the garden wall. _No, that it lacks. In addition to a Time-bound._  
     “That’s a bad thing, isn’t it?”  
    _It isn’t good. This session, Skaia itself –  what we are living in now is known as a void session. It can’t bear fruit. Not alone._  
     “Doesn’t that frighten you?”  
      _No, void sessions happen more often than not. They are the rule rather than the exception to it. It does lend a sense of anticlimax, however._  
     “You said it couldn’t bear fruit without help. What sort of help?”  
_Your natural curiosity, Jade, never ceases to impress me. I really did miss our little talks._ The White Queen takes a butter cookie off of a painted porcelain plate, popping it in her mouth. _The Page’s session is in good hands, Jade. You don’t need to worry about his fate._  
     “You’re being coy with me.”  
_Is that what this is? Being coy?_ She feigns shock. _Ah, little Witch, I know it pains you not to have the answer to everything laid before you. Your caution and your foresight made you an excellent player. But I can’t tell you everything, and I believe you already know that._  
     Your lips press into a thin line. “Forget I asked, then.”  
 _On the contrary._

     Without warning, all of the clouds obscuring the full white light of Skaia trundle out of the way. A spectacular beam of it sparkles across Prospit and causes all the stained glass to reflect it in rainbow fractals. You shield your eyes, in awe of it all, the quiet beauty, how it passes as quickly as it arrived. A flurry of nimbostratus clouds bustle to draw the curtain on the blinding brightness. You make out the gray outline of a tree with a tire swing, a little girl making a running start across a great green field.

_A mother will do whatever is best for her children. You’re a fine Guardian, Jade. When Jake needs you the most, you will be there for him. Even if it’s not in the way you expect._

  
  


     Nocturnal birds are jabbering in the dark jungle. There’s a cacophony of agitated squawking as they fly over the canopy in different directions. The hatchling dragon – whoops, you mean the winged reptile – may have snapped one up, or else some of them flew into the sticky web of a giant arachnid, squabbling and flapping in defiance as they’re wrapped in silk.

     Fast asleep, Jake doesn’t stir when you finally stand and carry him back inside. He’s getting heavy, and it hurts your knees to shuffle about with him in your arms. You didn’t used to be so frail. You could have stretched your arm above your head and balanced his little stomach on your palm if you were younger.

     Being old doesn’t bother you as much as it used to – being strong, being pretty, being dignified. You wish, though, that you didn’t have to rely on guns and robots to protect your boy. You wish you didn’t have to acclimate him to the sound of gunfire, the smell of its powder. You wish you didn’t have to teach him to lean on this crutch, these horrible machines that do nothing but harm. Your stepmother’s zoo is a dangerous place for a little boy. What other choice do you have but to take up arms? A mother will do whatever is best for her children.

     Jake will be breathing softly as you tuck him into his bed sheets, placing his glasses on the nightstand beside him. And suddenly you are so tired and so sad that as you’re smoothing out his quilt you just lay down beside him, a lonely left parenthesis, watching your grandson’s brow furrow in the middle of some unpleasant dream. You brush his hair out of his face, but his expression doesn’t soften. You think you will probably have to give him a haircut soon. Hopefully it will turn out better than the last.

     His night light casts the constellations across the ceiling. It turns everything purple and pink with the shifting colors of its bulb. The crayon drawings he made of his pet, of a helibot in flight, of you and him and the tower and you holding something that you think is supposed to be a rifle, you aren’t really sure. Stars float across framed photos of you and him, a photo in a frame of John in a newspaper. His pet bull snores in its birdcage, its dragonfly wings whirring in its sleep. You wonder if someone is looking over him on the other side of the universe. The Queen guarding him in his golden tower, the prince of Skaia’s moon.

     “Oh, my love, I hope you’re going to be okay,” you murmur. “I’ll stay right here, where you need me.”

     You take Jake’s hand, holding it lightly, and in his sleep he sighs and squeezes your fingers.


	23. 2000

     You will be ninety, and that is all.

 

     It will feel like being in retirement. Your children have packed you up and sent you off to the home, and now there is nothing left to do but play shuffleboard and do your crossword puzzles. The nurses feed you bowls of mash with your arthritis pills and you pass the days waiting to die.

     Okay, nix that last part. It isn’t that bad, but the routine will be awfully boring.

     You are not sure if you imagined you’d live this long. Jade English, dashed under the train tracks at age 16. Jade English, age 19, vagabond girl, casualty of a police shootout following botched bank robbery. Jade English, 20, dead after breaking-and-entering of her Pittsburgh studio apartment. Jade English, 20 years and some change, blows her arm off in a Freon experiment gone wrong. Nobel prize winner Jade English killed in apparent assassination at age 44. Jade English, contracting radium-induced cancer at 50. A million ways you could have died, heroic or just, shot down in glory or trampled under the dirty hoof of the world. You did not expect that you would live out your last days in the muggy jungle, sweat plastering your hair to your forehead as you collect jars of animal dung to be taken apart and analyzed in the laboratory.

     When you got up there in years, veins poking through brown skin, your hair shocked with streaks of silver, you wondered what it would be like to retire. To pass the torch down and move to some villa off of Italy, cracking open wine bottles and taking care of a dog or five. Texas liked the idea of Italy – he wanted you to retire to Venice. That might have been nice.

     Whichever way you slice it, retirement is very lonely. You will miss talking to people. You miss debating into the night over articles in the _Journal of Applied Physics_ , you miss bantering with lab techs. You miss being interviewed. You miss having people who cared about your opinion, who turned to you for answers. You miss being someone who mattered. You would never, ever let Jake think that he is not enough for you, but he isn’t a great conversational partner. And you can’t discuss the economy or politics with the White Queen.

     When you are in the jungle and your rifle is bouncing against your back and you’re heaving yourself up with swinging vines and crumbling rock, you wish you had someone with you. When the only thing you hear is the jabbering of wild animals and the beating of wings overhead, you think about the relationships you’ve fumbled and let slip away. You think about the few girlfriends you had that you became too busy for. You think of Charlotte and her shining hair, who was so much prettier than Marlowe and who you wanted very much to kiss, if you had known that that was what you wanted to do. You think of women you could have grown old with. You think of Calpurnia often. There was a time when you wanted to live with her, but she didn’t think it was a good idea, and you didn’t understand why but you let it drop because you had so many other things to worry about. You understand now, though, why Callie didn’t want to stay beside you. She didn’t want to twist the knife further.

 

     This morning you and Jake made pancakes with pumpkin and cinnamon. You took him to the laboratory to go over his sight words – at four years old, he reads better than he speaks, but he gets stuck on the silently -gh’s and is having trouble with _caught_ and _thought_ . You opened the cabinet where you keep your guns and had him point out the different parts of a pistol, though you hardly expect him to fire one at his age. When he got through his math problems and you had finished putting together a puzzle, you rewarded him by letting him choose a movie. He’s up there now, playing with your skulltop, watching _The Princess Bride_ if he isn’t tugging on his pet’s tail. Someday you think that thing will get fed up with your grandson and fly out the window. Then you’d have to trap him another one.

     You reach the dirt trail that you’ve cleaved through part of the jungle. It winds past a shallow creek and skirts around the edge of centaur territory. You tried very hard to come up with a reasonable name for these beasts, but ungulate primates just sounded asinine. So fuck it, they’re centaurs, and every now and then you have to jump out from the lumbering shadow of their hooves. What a horrible island you’re settling.

     A set of eyes blinks in the trees and disappears. You have come to know the schedule of these animals, their comings and goings, their individual schedules. Most of them are tagged – you track their adventures ‘round their territories with colored lines. So you know that the animal who just peered at you was Elwin, your name for a bipedal crustacean that ventures into the wood when there isn’t enough seafood to scavenge in the tidal pools. Elwin is a juvenile, more docile than his parents. Of his family members, he’s hissed at you the least. When his white shell vanishes into the leaves, you push up your glasses and keep walking.

     All at once a heavy Pacific wind blusters through the jungle, bending the trees. Birds squawk and fly from the canopy. Shielding your face, you look up into the cloudless sky. You spot an agitated mother dragon –  again, fuck it – who beats her wings as she groans in displeasure. Her tail lashes behind her as she latches onto the side of the volcano and climbs inside. You will assume it was the wind in her leathery wings that caused such a draft, but you will assume incorrectly. The sound of the dragon’s gravelly complaint will merge with the sound of engines roaring overhead.

     Its shadow blots out the sun, a massive thing so dark you almost can’t tell that it’s red. Great horns spill out of it like those of a beetle, like the tines of a fork, the prongs of a trident. You will stand with your mouth agape and watch it pass over you. Goosebumps blossom on your skin when the temperature drops, the whole jungle cloaked in chilly darkness. A sliver of sunlight peers from behind the ship and gives off the gleam of bright, bloody, Crocker red.

     All your instincts will fight their way to surface, clogging themselves together. You just stand and do nothing, your fingers twitching, your chest heavy and cold. You want to shoot at the ship, but you also want to throw up.

     The engine overhead will groan, the sound of deceleration. You look behind you, at the visible tip of the tower where Jake is right now. Oh, _fuck_ , Jake. Your meteor child, your only Hope.

     You start running in the opposite direction, back to the house where your grandson needs you.

 

     On the way through the jungle path you will trip and skin your knees, cursing as you pull yourself up and continue your beeline to the tower. At the bridge over the stream, you will stumble backward and almost fall when a herd of marsupials scatter across your path with their tails raised in alarm, squealing their danger calls as they flee from something deeper in the trees. One of the juveniles bashes its ram horns against a tree in its panic, shakes its head hard, and keeps dashing after its herd.

     Trees bend and snap, the echoes of branches breaking in half. It comes from each direction, demanding attention, demanding distraction. You yank your rifle from your back and cock it, looking every which way for the sight of something approaching. The red of a drone, the shining of armor. Your heart slams in your chest, your weapon trembling in your hands.

     Whispering in the trees. You hear the ghost of a laugh, the tittering of condescension, the sound of a footstep. You’re being psyched out.

     “Come out here!” you yell into the wood. The rifle’s muzzle is aimed somewhere in the thick of the underbrush. “I know you’re there, so just show yourself!”

     The black of the jungle comes alive and forms a shape, a mass of writhing hair and horn. Your breath will become shallow as she emerges from the wood, freckles of sunlight basking across her face, revealing dull gray and vivid fuchsia. Black tendrils of hair cascade around her, her horns have grown tall and poke into the branches. Her mouth splits into a wide, rubbery grin as she finally gets a good look at you. Betty tosses her hair from her shoulder and steps toward you.

     “Hello, angelfish. Long time no see.”

     Colors hiss and buzz around her silhouette, flashing shades of yellow, purple, green, red. It dances about her in bright pulses that hurt your eyes and make you squint. It shimmers about her trident, long and golden, accented with curls of pink sapphire. Betty Crocker has shed her skin, shook off her sundresses and her kitten heels and her pearl necklaces. It has been so long that you almost forgot what she looked like under the mask, how grotesque, the uncanny angles and the cut of her cheekbones, the gills in her neck, how her fins twitched when she laughed. She had caricatured herself in your memory, eyes that were too big, teeth that were too sharp. Confronted with the reality, you almost fail to recognize her.

     For a moment you are so afraid that you want to drop your weapon and raise your hands, to acquiesce to punishment, to be sent to bed without supper. Then fear will be washed over with fury, with hot rage that burns in your throat.

     You lift your rifle and pull the trigger.

     Betty deflects it with the length of her trident – the bullet bounces off with a metallic _ping._ The Crocker family has gone zero days since its last incident.

 

     “That’s no way to greet your mother, little gill,” flouts the Baroness.  
     “You’re not my mother,” you hiss. You raise the muzzle again. “So get the hell away from us.”

     You fire and your stepmother lifts her palm, stopping the bullet mid-flight. Its shell glitters with the spasmodic flashing that traces her body, the colors you recognize from the demon named English. Betty closes the bullet in her hand and lets it shatter, shards of metal drifting to the forest floor.

     “Someone should beach you how to respect your elders,” she titters.

     Raising her fist and wrenching it to her, you feel the air leave your lungs as your stepmother drags you in her direction. Your legs flop pitifully beneath you, puppet’s limbs at her mercy. She forces you to your knees, your arms and legs heavy and immobile. Your rifle clatters to the ground.

     Leaning down to your level, Betty angles your chin this way and that in her cold hand, looking you over, clucking with disapproval.

     “Oh, _look_ at you, guppy. I knew you wouldn’t age well, but it really is such a shame. You used to be so cute. There isn’t much fun in culling a hag.”

     She traces your mouth with her thumb, and with all the muscle you’re able to muster, you bite down hard on it. Betty gasps and lets go of you, and in her distraction you take your rifle and hit her across the face with the stock. The first time you ever did this to somebody was in Wichita, when an older boy pulled a shank on you. Marlowe told you that what you did was called a “buttstroke,” which made you laugh so hard you cried.

     The buttstroke knocks Betty’s circlet askew. It sits lopsided in her hairline as a thin stream of pink blood trickles down her temple. She turns and glares at her with her shark teeth baring, an expression that, despite her alien appearance, you recognize all too well. The narrow slits of her eyes as she raised her hand, the ugly downturn of her red lips as she threw a wine glass across the room, knowing that the sound of the glass shattering alone would terrify you. Your stepmother slaps you so hard that you see stars. The rings on her fingers, you can already tell, have left cuts on your cheek.

     “So many chances you’ve had to prove yourshell, and you wasted all of them,” says the Baroness. “Pitiful grub, languishing in the muck. No wonder your brother couldn’t stand you.”  
     You wipe the blood from your lip. The words take a moment to sink in. Finally, you murmur, “You called him my brother.”  
     “Of course he was. Blood and bile, two halves of the same slime. You left him all alone, and I was the only one left to care for the buoy. What kind of sister does that, hm? What kind of wicked little gill?” Betty adjusts her circlet, wiping away the fuchsia smear and licking her finger. “Ain’t no mystery why he never spoke aboat you again.”  
     “Why did you do it?” you gasp, your breath labored. “What was the point of lying?”  
     “Because that house was very boring, and lying made it fun.” Your stepmother will twirl her hair around her finger. “The two of you were alwaves trouble. I wanted to make sure that when you pushed him away–” She grins, all her sharp white teeth shining, “–he wouldn’t want to follow.”  
     Your heart beats hard enough to burst, anger making your sight fuzzy. Lunging at her, you yell, “Shut up! Shut up about John, you fucking bitch!”

     The Baroness easily deflects you, tossing you backward into the dirt. A shock of pain runs up your spine when you land hard. Your stepmother cackles at you.

     “Yes! Sea, _that’s_ what I mean! Get up and prove yourself! Stop floundering in the dirt!”

     She raises her trident and begins to fling it at you. You stop its trajectory with the length of your rifle, jamming it between two prongs. The two of you struggle with one another, a back-and-forth that ends with you hollering as you force the points of the trident into the ground.

     “Why are you here? Why now, after so much time?”  
     “Aw, did you miss me, angelfish?” Your stepmother will catch every single bullet that fires from the sniper rifle you’ve just taken from your strife specibus, a cloud of lead that she crunches with the clench of her fist. She throws them back at you, and they shower you as you lift your arms to protect your face. “Don’t take it personshoally. If it were up to me, I’d let you rot here. But English had other plans for you. So be a good gill and let Mother cut you down – it’s for the good of the timeline.”

 

     Your stepmother will thrust the trident towards you and you will roll out of the way, the sound of its prongs whizzing just past your ear. When you look up at her you will notice how her hand hovers at the circlet on her forehead, fingers delicately placed to protect the Piscine symbol in its center. A flicker of an idea will occur to you – there may be something about the circlet that lends her those flashing colors, how she’s able to rebuff all your attacks. If you can knock off the circlet, maybe you can–  

     You throw yourself to your feet and launch the rifle stock at her face, aiming for her hairline. The diadem goes flying, landing somewhere in the bushes. Your stepmother does not recognize what’s happened right away, but then she touches her fingertips to her forehead and scowls.

     “Clever gill,” she growls, “but not clever enough.”

     In the next moment, you’re tossed aside when she lifts her foot and kicks you square in the chest.

     “My sweet guppy, the runt of my litter,” she breathes. “I’m going to miss this. Of all my little heiresses, you’ve been nearly the most fun.”

     You dodge her quickly enough to avoid getting your face stomped on, but her foot still pins down your hair, and you yelp with pain as you try to roll further away. What a waste of effort – her skin hasn’t even stopped flashing. Removing the circlet didn’t help.

     “So many of them, I’ve lost count. Fuchsia-blooded princesses, playing dress up in my gold and my palaces. They all had so much fun pretending. They all thought they had a chance. You know, now that I think on it….” Betty reaches for you with her pink claws and sweeps your silver hair from your face, staring into each eye. “I never got to kill my final heiress. She swam right out from between my fingers.”  
     Your ribs ache –  a few of them might be broken. Your chest feels tight with each inhale. “Oh, whatever the hell you’re talking about, just shut up already.”  
     She laughs in your face. “Just the kind of thing you’d want to hear, if you were in the arena. You’d say your lines and I’d run you through and there’d be so much tyrian to mop up when it was over. That’s why I’m so glad I have you, angelfish. It’s been a fun few sweeps we’ve had together, hasn’t it?”  
     You angle your chin away from her. “God, you must be fucking ancient.”  
     She leans down to whisper in your ear, her pink-veined fins fidgeting. “I hatched when your people were living in caves and shitting in the woods, and I will be alive after the very last of you is dead.”

     She’s so close to you – you can smell the perfume she always sprayed on her wrists, a sharp saltwater scent. Now is your chance. You seize the long hair that dangles from her face and yank her forward, bashing your head against hers. You will see stars for a moment as you take the seconds you’ve been given to flee.

     “Not so fast, wiggler!” Betty calls after you. “You can run, but you can’t hide from your mother!”

 

     You skid down a rocky slope and escape getting speared through with the trident, which goes sailing over your head and pierces a tree. You keep running headlong into the woods, away from the tower to lure Betty away from your boy. Suddenly you’ll fall backward and crash into a tree when the jungle ahead of you is blasted away seemingly out of nowhere. The undergrowth is utterly vaporized, smoking and phosphorous. As you lie panting on the ground with your elbows all scratched up, Betty hovers over you, floating light as air off the ground. Her eyes gleam, smoldering as she bats her eyelashes. She’s already reclaimed her trident.

     “Let’s not keep this up much longer, it’s majorly bumming me out,” your stepmother clucks. “It’s like chasing a rat around in a cage. You have nowhere to go, and you know how this ends.” She grins and grips her weapon, the sapphires gleaming. “So let’s get it over with.”

     You expel a hunting knife from your specibus and throw it at her. She blocks it, and it tumbles into the rocks. Though you have low expectations, you open fire on her once more. She vaporizes the bullets with her eyes and steps forward.

     “I’ve had enough of this, Jade. It’s time you start doing as you’re – _told_!”

     A magnetic pull yanks you forward. Your stepmother seizes you by the collar and runs the trident through your torso.

 

     The pain is so hot that you just hang there, mouth open like a fish. You can’t even scream. Betty pulls the prongs out of you, a sickening sound like wrenching a knife from an animal’s hide, crunching of bone and tearing of flesh. You can’t look down to see how deep she’s pierced, but you can see the smear of blood against gold as she pulls it away.

     Your stepmother will let you fall, and you will press your hands to your wounds. Blood rushes between your fingers, plastering your clothes to your skin, filling your nose with the smell of copper.

     “You – actually, did it,” you gasp. “Didn’t think you – had, _oh_ , it in you.”

     Your stepmother will be on one knee now, her face cocked to watch the color drain from your face. She’s twirling your gray hair around her finger, gazing at you so fondly that you could almost call it affection.

     “A mother never lies, angelfish. Don’t you agree that this is so much better than our little cat-and-mouse?”

     You breathe in sharply as blood spits from your stomach. Each time your heart beats, it makes the blood rush from your wounds. It’s like your body is trying to dump it all out of you as quickly as possible, to spare you your pride and get it all over with. But what really hurts is that you hardly know what to say to your stepmother in this moment. Every nasty things you could have said, every question, every complaint, has slowly burned up over the past several decades. Clever rebuttals forgotten, imaginary arguments no longer important. You want to say something that will hurt her, you want to say something that she won't forget for the rest of her long, long life. But you can't come up with a single thing.

     “Don't hurt him,” you shudder. “Tell me you won't touch my fucking child.”  
     She brushes your cheekbone with her long, pink nails. “Don't worry a hair on your head. That boy will come to serve me when he's good and ready.”

     A shudder-shock of icy pain ripples through you. Your hands and feet feel like they're made of static.

     “You… I’m….” you mutter, sweat beading on your forehead.   
     “I can't hear you, little one,” Betty says sweetly, her face just inches from yours. “You'll have to speak up.”  
     “I’ll see you again, on the other side,” you choke. The taste of pennies in your mouth, metallic and sharp. You can feel the blood under your tongue, seeping between your teeth. “And when we meet again, I’m going to kill you.”

     Your stepmother laughs, her hand held before her mouth, her golden rings glittering.

     “Oh, guppy, the other witch won’t remember me at all. She won’t remember being you, she won’t remember anything.” She traces your jaw with her clammy hands, the soft pinprick of her pointed nails. “And that’s a shame. Because when I meet you again, I’m going to make you my pet.”

     You stare up at your stepmother and her face will be doubled, ghosting across each other as your vision blurs. She’s smiling down at you with her shark teeth, her tyrian lips parted, and you can feel the final blow coming. You will feel that familiar fear, the dread that pooled in your stomach, the flash of anger and the sting of pain that followed her hand striking your face. For a tiny and terrible moment you are Jade Crocker, a scared and sad little girl.

 _Don’t hurt me_ , you want to mutter, _I’m sorry, Mother. I won’t do it again. I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t hurt me._

     Your hand is twitching at your torso, sticky and wet. You lift it slowly, fingers fidgeting, and smear your blood across her face.

  
  
  
  


     Your name is Jade English, and you are trying to make it back home.

     Jade English, you will be working so hard to make it just a little further. Your hair hangs in front of your face like a net, collecting dirt, matted together with drying blood. There are crescents of soil under your nails, crusted to your wet hands each time you grasp a clump of earth to drag yourself forward. The effort it takes to crawl makes it hard for your wounds to congeal, so each time you move the blood doesn’t stop seeping. Flies are settling on you now, on your legs and in your hair. They buzz around you in dirty halos. Roadkill, a martyr on the side of the freeway. They know better than you that you are not long for this world.

     Somewhere in the tower, Jake will be looking for you. You never take this long, you never stay past the setting of the sun. He knows that, doesn’t he? The thought of dying here is not quite so terrible as the thought of him finding you, rotten and half-eaten, chewed on by beasts, torn apart and unrecognizable. Even if you died at the doorstep, if you pulled yourself just past the threshold and bled out in the foyer, that might be enough. It would save you that last sliver of dignity. He wouldn’t have to go looking for you.

     The jungle is dark and the sky is full of stars. Animals hum and chirp in the black, eyes blinking at you, watching you struggle, waiting for the moment when you stop reaching forward. You have stopped trying to see where you’re going. The moonlight in the branches is too sparse to light the way.

     Jade English, you will be so tired by now. Your breath is slow, soft and shallow as you twitch your fingers to grasp on something, anything. You drag your knee forward, start to lift yourself up, and fall again. But pride is still burning hot inside of you, pride that will not accept the truth that you are dying, and you are not going to make it home.

     When you die there will be no dream bubbles. You will not awake with milky eyes, lighter than air, hopscotching through the broken mosaic pieces of your memories. There will not be friends waiting for you on the other side, there will be no John sitting in the library, looking up from his book and wondering why you slept so long, and if you’d like to sit down for a game of cards.

     Jade English, history will forget you. Gag orders will be placed, documents and records and video recordings will be placed in a pyre to burn. The ones who loved you will die, and the rest will be too afraid to speak your name.

     Only one will carry your torch. She will carry the memory of you like a secret, and when at last she meets her star-brother, the prince of the dark moon, she will whisper your name to him. They will pick up where you left off. They will remember you at last, their girl from the island, their giggling gnostic hiding in the garden. Jade English, the Seer and the Knight will not let your story slip away.

     The night is dark and the jungle is hot. Your blood is wet. The flies are buzzing. Your body feels very cold.

 

     You will dig your hand into the dirt and keep crawling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and thats all folks! if you finished reading you make up one of the 5 people i thought would do so. congratulations on having great taste in characters.


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